A Primer for Undergraduate Research

This highly readable book aims to ease the many challenges of starting undergraduate research. It accomplishes this by presenting a diverse series of self-contained, accessible articles which include specific open problems and prepare the reader to tackle them with ample background material and references. Each article also contains a carefully selected bibliography for further reading.

This highly readable book aims to ease the many challenges of starting undergraduate research. It accomplishes this by presenting a diverse series of self-contained, accessible articles which include specific open problems and prepare the reader to tackle them with ample background material and references. Each article also contains a carefully selected bibliography for further reading.The content spans the breadth of mathematics, including many topics that are not normally addressed by the undergraduate curriculum (such as matroid theory, mathematical biology, and operations research), yet have few enough prerequisites that the interested student can start exploring them under the guidance of a faculty member. Whether trying to start an undergraduate thesis, embarking on a summer REU, or preparing for graduate school, this book is appropriate for a variety of students and the faculty who guide them. 

Coxeter Groups and the Davis Complex (T.A. Schroeder).- A Tale of Two Symmetries: Embeddable and Non-Embeddable Group Actions on Surfaces (V. Peterson, A. Wootton).- Tile Invariants for Tackling Tiling Questions (M.P. Hitchman).- Forbidden Minors: Finding the Finite Few (T.W. Mattman).- Introduction to competitive graph coloring (C. Dunn, V. Larsen, J.F. Nordstrom).- Matrioids (E. McNicholas, N.A. Neudauer, C. Starr).- Finite Frame Theory (S. Datta, J. Oldroyd).- Mathematical decision-making with linear and convex programming (J. Kotas).- Computing weight multiplicities (P. E. Harris).- Vaccination strategies for small worlds. (W. Just, H. C. Highlander).- Steady and Stable: Numerical Investigations of Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations (R. C. Harwood).