by Lara Pudwell
As you read this year’s newsletter you’ll hear about the varied things that department members did with their summer vacations. For me, summer means lots of extra time for research, and research means lots of counting.
This summer the department ran our fifth Valparaiso Experience in Research by Undergraduate Mathematicians (VERUM) program. The primary goal of VERUM is to give talented undergraduates exposure to conducting mathematics research. Students from schools all over the country apply to work on interesting problems and spend 9 weeks on campus working under the guidance of a Valpo faculty member. You can learn more about the structure of the program by reading my 2010 newsletter entry at http://www.valpo.edu/mcs/alumni/pudwell10.php
This year’s cohort worked in 3 teams. Three students worked with Alex Capaldi on “Mathematical Models of Infectious Disease”, three worked with Michael Glass and Melissa Desjarlais on “Computer Monitored Problem Solving Dialogues”, and three worked with me on “Pattern Avoidance in Trees”. In fact, you can read abstracts of each of the projects at http://www.valpo.edu/mcs/verum/summer2011projects.php All three groups had very productive summers.
The 2012 VERUM program will be under (somewhat) new management. Rick Gillman and Zsuzsanna Szaniszlo co-ran our initial VERUM program in the summers of 2005, 2006, and 2007. Rick managed VERUM in 2010. With his recent promotion to Assistant Provost, Rick and I co-managed the 2011 program, and I will run the program by myself in 2012. Apparently, on top of research, I’m starting to learn how to be an administrator, and count dollars in grant budgets too.
Counting mathematical trees with VERUM students wasn’t the only research event in my summer. Each summer since 2006, I have attended the International Conference on Permutation Patterns. This year’s conference was held at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California for a week in June. I presented a joint paper on “Enumeration Schemes for Dashed Permutation Patterns” with my collaborator Andrew Baxter (Penn State), and enjoyed catching up with others of my research collaborators from around the world. I came back to Valpo with even more ideas of things to count than when I left. In fact a series of talks at the Permutation Patterns conference motivated the problem I’m working on with a group of Valpo students through the department’s academic year undergraduate research program for 2011-2012.
Even though summer is over, there are still permutations and trees (and budget dollars) to count…