Resources for Undergraduate Research – Issue No. 2
Sarah Adams,
Darren A. Narayan, Rochester Institute of Technology
Publication and Presentation Venues for Undergraduate
Research in Mathematics
As your summer research projects are heating up, or as you look forward to research activities next fall, you may be considering venues to publish and present student research. In fact, students and faculty involved in successful collaborations are in constant search of such venues! With the large number of journals and conferences available, it can be difficult to choose the best venue for a particular research project. In this issue, we highlight a special selection of such venues.
Venues for Publications
In addition to the traditional mathematical journals where the authors are usually research faculty, there are some journals that specialize in mathematical research done by undergraduates. These include the Pi Mu Epsilon Journal, The Pentagon: The Official Journal of Kappa Mu Epsilon, Rose-Hulman Undergraduate Mathematics Journal, Furman University Electronic Journal of Undergraduate Mathematics, and the Morehead Electronic Journal of Applicable Mathematics.
These journals are all excellent venues for undergraduates to present their research, however it is generally accepted that they are not at the same level as traditional faculty-oriented journals. In this column, we highlight the new undergraduate research journal, Involve – A Journal of Mathematics, which is in a class by itself. The journal boasts an impressive editorial board of distinguished faculty and articles are to be reviewed by MathSciNet and Zentralblaat Math, a known distinction for quality journals This distinction also allows student work to be more easily searchable and citable!
Involve – A Journal of Mathematics; An interview with the founding
editor
By Kenneth S. Berenhaut,
and Darren Narayan, Rochester Institute of Technology
Below is an interview by Column Editor Darren Narayan with the Involve’s founding editor,
Kenneth S. Berenhaut of
D. N. What is the scope of Involve - A Journal of
Mathematics? (mathematics, statistics, mathematical
physics, mathematical biology, etc.)
K. S. B. Submissions in all mathematical areas are encouraged. Certainly, we gladly welcome manuscripts in the areas that you have mentioned.
D. N. What type of work will the journal publish? (original research, expository papers, survey papers, etc.)
K. S. B. Papers should include original results and be publishable in quality journals in their respective fields.
D. N. Do authors have to be students, or can papers
be joint between students and faculty?
K. S. B. The main
criterion is that each manuscript should include a minimum of one-third student authorship. To provide quality for acceptance, we expect
that many articles will be coauthored with faculty.
D. N. Some respected mathematics journals have
lengthy refereeing times and long publication backlogs. By the time an article comes to press the
student will sometimes no longer be an undergraduate and could be well into
further studies. What is the expected
timeline from when the paper is received?
K. S. B. All submissions can be expected to follow a standard quality refereeing process.
Involve’s
editorial board consists of more than fifty noted mathematicians and respected
mentors who are motivated to move the papers through the process. Mathematical Sciences Publishers (MSP) of UC
Berkeley which publishes Involve has
a well-developed online submission and paper-tracking system, in addition to an
efficient mathematically-oriented editorial team. Online publication occurs immediately
following approval of the final galley proofs.
The print issue should come out soon after that.
D. N. Are there any page costs?
K. S. B. No; as per MSP policy, there are no publication charges to the author.
D. N. How much does a subscription to Involve cost?
K. S. B. Subscriptions to Involve are available to departments for $100 per year, which includes two copies of each issue. The journal is also available as part of MSP’s fine affordable journal package that includes the established and well-respected journals Algebraic & Geometric Topology and Geometry & Topology as well as the more recently launched Algebra & Number Theory, Analysis & PDE, and Communications in Applied Mathematics and Computational Science. The current cost of the package is set at $800 for print and electronic and $500 for electronic only. Readers are encouraged to contact either myself or MSP for further information.
D. N. Are you in search of potential referees?
K. S. B. We can always use assistance in the refereeing process. Interested parties are welcome to send me their contact information.
D. N. Will articles be reviewed in Mathematical
Reviews / MathSciNet?
K. S. B. Indeed, Involve is already listed with Mathematical Reviews and Zentralblaat MATH.
D.N. Is
there anything you would like to add?
K. S. B. I’d like to mention that Involve is very pleased to have MapleSoft and SAS as sponsors. There’s plenty of information about Involve and its editorial board at www.involvemath.org. If anyone has any questions, they can feel free to contact me at the address below: Kenneth S. Berenhaut, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC 27109 or by email at: berenhks@wfu.edu.
Thank you for your time!
Venues for Presentations
You can always feel the excitement in the air when
undergraduates are presenting their research at professional meetings. There
are many places where undergraduates can make such presentations, including MAA
section meetings, the Pi Mu Epsilon Session at MathFest, the Summer Meeting of
the MAA, the Young Mathematician’s Conference held annually at the
AMS-MAA-SIAM
Special Session for Research in Mathematics by Undergraduates
For the past several years the annual Joint Mathematics Meetings has featured an AMS-MAA-SIAM Special Session for Research in Mathematics by Undergraduates. This session is for undergraduate students to give a 20 minute talk on research they have done at their home institution or as part of an NSF-REU or similar program. Of course students can submit an abstract to give a talk in a contributed paper session in their particular research area, however these talks are only 10 minutes in length. Furthermore contributed paper sessions usually only have overhead projector(s) available, whereas the special session is also equipped with computer projectors for a student wanting to present using Powerpoint, Beamer, or other software. In past years this session has been co-sponsored by MacKichan Software Inc., who has donated several full versions of the software Scientific Workplace which were given out as door prizes to students participating in the session.
There is a special session on the schedule for the 2009
Joint Mathematics Meetings in
The organizers for this year’s session include: Darren A.
Narayan, Carl V. Lutzer, Tamas
Wiandt, of the Rochester Institute of Technology,
Jacqueline A. Jensen of
Hudson
River Undergraduate Mathematics Conference
By Patti Frazer Lock, St.
Lawrence University
Every April
for the last fifteen years, the Hudson River Undergraduate Mathematics
Conference has celebrated undergraduate research in the mathematical
sciences. The conference is a one day
event and is usually held on the second or third Saturday in April at rotating
institutions in the
To quote the conference webpage: “The goal of the Hudson River Undergraduate Mathematics Conference is to provide undergraduates with the experience of attending and/or presenting at a professional mathematics meeting designed primarily with the student in mind. We hope to establish at the conference an atmosphere that sends the message welcome to the mathematics community.”
Conference participation ranges from 300 to 600 people. Some students attend as first-year students or sophomores and begin to think more seriously about mathematics and to look forward to presenting as juniors and seniors. About 60-65% of the student speakers are seniors, while the rest are underclass students (including juniors, sophomores, and freshmen.) The talks span a wide range, from talks for specialists to talks geared to first and second year students, and from talks on original research to purely expository talks.
The students take the conference very seriously and take real ownership of the conference. About half of the session chairs are students, for example, and the host institution committee has student representatives helping to plan the meeting and working at the conference. The student talks are outstanding. Indeed, with fourteen concurrent sessions, the hardest part is deciding which talks to attend.
The keynote speakers have also been outstanding and have included some impressive and well-known mathematicians and speakers, including Jeff Weeks, Georgia Benkart, Ken Ono, Ken Ribet, Nancy Kopell, Louis Gross, Bob Devaney, Ingrid Daubechies, Peter Hilton, John Koch, Joe Gallian, Benoit Mandelbrot, Ron Graham, Jean Taylor, and John Conway.
The first Hudson River
Undergraduate Mathematics Conference (HRUMC) was held in 1994 at
The most recent Hudson River
Undergraduate Mathematics Conference was held at St. Lawrence University in
The conference organizers
gratefully acknowledge the generous support from the MAA in helping to fund
this conference (most recently from MAA NSF-RUMC -- NSF Grant DMS-536991) and from
numerous other granting organizations over the years. Plans are already underway for HRUMC 2009,
which will be held
HRUMC 2009 will continue the tradition of being another wonderful celebration of undergraduate mathematics research!
-- Patti Frazer Lock is Cummings Professor of Mathematics at St. Lawrence University and chaired the Steering Committee for HRUMC 2008.
The Young Mathematicians
Conference at
By Thomas Kerler,
Every year the National Science Foundation sponsors
about sixty REU programs in mathematics nationwide, in each of which a group of
faculty conducts research with typically eight to twelve undergraduate students
during the summer. Thus, together with an increasing number of institutionally
supported projects, roughly six hundred undergraduate students are working on
mathematical research projects mostly during the summer months. Many of them
will have obtained results by the end of each summer, well worthy of wider
dissemination and of interest often even to advanced mathematicians.
For many years the undergraduate paper sessions of
the MAA MathFest have provided the most popular
opportunity for students to present their research. Students blend into the
exciting national event that attracts well over a thousand participants from
all ranks of mathematics and all parts of the country. For students and mentors
who prefer a smaller setting that is specifically centered around
its undergraduate participants and their summer projects numerous undergraduate
research conferences have sprung up more recently at various institutions. As
opposed to the MathFest paper sessions, however, most
of them tend to be regional conferences and often run only sporadically or as
one-time events.
The Young
Mathematicians Conference (YMC), which has been held each August at The
Ohio State University since 2003, attempts to combine the best
of these two worlds:
Student
Talk on "Intrinsically linked S1-graphs" at YMC2005
Not unlike the MathFest, YMC is by now a truly national event. Indeed, the
number of students applying to YMC in 2007 was close to the same as the number
of students scheduled for talks at the 2007 MathFest
- about 140 in either case. Every region of the country is well represented at
the conference: In 2007 roughly 40% of participants came from the Northeastern
region, and the Midwestern, Southern and Western regions were represented by
20% of the participants each. In total students from almost thirty US states
attended YMC2007.
At the same time YMC manages to preserve the
personal and engaging atmosphere of a smaller conference, with its focus
entirely on its undergraduate participants and their research. The core ingredient
of the three day conference schedule are the 42-44 student talks held in three
parallel sessions, as well as the always lively poster sessions on Saturday
morning. Breaks between talks blocks, numerous social
occasions, and other supporting events provide plenty of opportunities for
students to discuss mathematics with their peers as well as with participating
senior mathematicians.
How, then, are the continuously increasing
applicant numbers to YMC handled so that every invited student participant is
indeed delivering one of the talks or is presenting one of the 10-15 posters?
Student
discussions and Poster Session at YMC2006
Right from the beginning YMC
tried to accommodate many undergraduates who collaborated on the same projects
and preferred to present their work as a group. Since 2006 YMC formally allows
pairs (but not triples) of students to jointly submit applications for a presentations. Typically, a little more than a third
of all presentations at YMC are delivered, often quite creatively, by two
students together.
Of greater impact, however, was the decision in the
same year to make participation at YMC truly competitive. Even with the joint
presentation policies, the number of applicants significantly exceeded the
number of students that could be accommodated or funded, without sacrificing
the personal character the conference or inflating the budget beyond reason.
Consequently, YMC met the challenge to put into place a rigorous, fair, and
expeditious selection process which decides on who is invited to the conference
based on the submitted research abstracts.
In 2007, for example, YMC invited 73 students of
the 138 applicants (52%) for a presentation with full travel support, based on
a thorough review of abstracts by ten mathematics professors of various ranks,
backgrounds, and institutions. A custom web based management tool allowed
reviewers to view and sort all submitted abstracts online and submit or edit
their own scores in the same web application. Using this an
academic ranking of applicants by average scores could be generated remotely
within 48 hours of the application deadline. Student applicants can find help
on the YMC web site with writing style and LaTeX
typesetting of their research abstracts, which also appear in print in the
conference booklet if accepted.
Besides the ever more sophisticated student
presentations (which routinely attract graduate students and regular faculty
from OSU) YMC offers numerous other events designed to guide, entice, and
inspire its undergraduate participants into academic careers in mathematics:
John
H Conway: Lecturing on "Lexicodes" at
YMC2004
Each conference is highlighted by
three key note lectures by highly accomplished mathematicians, who introduce
students to advanced, innovative, and exciting topics in mathematics. Speakers in the past included recipients of the prestigious
MacArthur and Sloan Fellowships, the Pólya and Nevanlinna Prizes, as well as of the Haimo,
Chauvenet, and Allendoerfer
Awards for excellence in exposition and teaching. Since 2004 all plenary
lectures are video taped and, combined with available slides, posted as real
streams on the YMC
main web site.
An instant success was the Graduate School
Orientation, which was introduced last year (2007) upon frequent request. The
event also recognizes the fact that around half of all YMC participants are
about to start their senior year when they attend the conference, that is, at a
time when most are thinking about applications to graduate schools. In order to
expose students to a variety of programs and perspectives representatives of
seven
In the Sunday morning panel
discussion the invited faculty members and graduate students answered a wide
array of questions about graduate studies in general and their own programs in
particular. Most questions that arose during the discussion were previously
submitted in a ballot box or touched upon in individual discussions between
students and representatives during the previous days.
The emphasis of YMC on professional preparation of
its young researchers is further underlined by plans for YMC 2009 to add a
refereed and electronically published proceedings volume. In future years
additional online publications for articles not presented at YMC as well as an
arXiv.org-overlay as an unrefereed preprint
repository for undergraduate research papers are scheduled to follow.
This year (2008) YMC is taking a break for much
needed general maintenance work such as securing long term funding, integrating
numerous innovations for the coming years, and institutionalizing various parts
of the organizational mechanics.
YMC2006
Plenary Speakers discussing with students.
(left to right: Peter Shor, Joan Hutchinson, Arthur Benjamin)
From 2003 until 2006 YMC was
funded under the NSF VIGRE grant of the Department of Mathematics at
For more information and documentation about YMC
visit the link found below.
http://www.math.osu.edu/conferences/ymc
To submit an article (roughly 2-4 pages in length) to be considered for a future issue of this MAA Online Column of Resources for Undergraduate Research, please email a pdf to both editors Sarah Adams (sarah.adams AT olin.edu) and Darren Narayan (dansma AT rit.edu). Thank you for reading and please email us with any comments or suggestions!
Sincerely,
The Editors, Sarah Spence Adams and Darren Narayan
Sarah Spence Adams is an Associate Professor of Mathematics
at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering.
Darren Narayan is an Associate Professor and Director of
Undergraduate Research in Mathematics at the Rochester Institute of
Technology.