REU2018

Summer is near and we will be running an informal summer research program, as usual. Who are we? We are Alex Iosevich, Vitaly Lorman and Jonathan Pakianathan. This year the program is going to center around combinatorial geometry. What are we going to do? We are going to review the basics of combinatorial geometry, read a couple of papers and then try to prove some some results that are currently open. We do not have a timeline, just the desire to understand as much as possible. The reading materials are enclosed below. If you are interested in participating, please email Alex Iosevich at iosevich@gmail.com. The program is going to begin in May right after the end of the semester and will continue as long as there is interest.

Our first meeting will take place on Tuesday, May 15, at 10 a.m. in the math lounge on the 9th floor of Hylan. We are generally going to meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays, though additional meetings may be scheduled as needed.

We are going to begin the program by reading a beautiful paper by Bourgain, Katz and Tao, entitled "A sum-product estimate in finite fields and applications". When you start reading this paper, your initial reaction may be to run away screaming. This is completely normal as frustration is an integral part of research mathematics. The key is to follow up the screaming sessions with intensive reading and scribbling in order to understand what the paper is all about.

The following people have expressed interest in participating in the program so far:

Kathryn Chotkowski (senior)
John Ennis (junior)
Linus Ge (sophomore)
Lucy Lu (sophomore)
Tianyi Ma (sophomore)
Gregory Mihailyszyn (sophomore)
Cole Miller (sophomore)
Adeel Qayum (sophomore)
Anna Shors (sophomore)
Manuel Stoeckl (junior)
Giang Truong (sophomore)
Chu Wang (sophomore)
Brier Wu (sophomore)
Szu-Ti Yao (junior)
Yiyao Zhang (sophomore)