ISU's 1998 Summer REU Program

During the summer of 1998 seven undergraduates from across the United States met on the Iowa State University campus for the NSF sponsored REU program on Scientific Computing. The participants were:

• Jayadev Athreya, Iowa State University
• Edward Baum, California State University, Los Angeles
• Marcus Calhoun-Lopez, University of Chicago
• Brian Dean, Notre Dame University
• Daniel Leeds, Shippensburg University, PA
• Tina Ryms, University of Pittsburgh, PA
• Tony Webster, Black Hills State, South Dakota

There were three faculty mentors for the program:

• Professor James Cornette, ISU;
• Professor Max Gunzburger, ISU;
• Professor Janet Peterson, ISU;

• John Burkardt, of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center;

• Todd Peterson, MS student in applied mathematics;
• Wenxiang Zhu, PhD student in applied mathematics.

The students spent their first week in Ames getting acquainted with each other, their surroundings, and the goals of the program. The three group projects were introduced and the participants worked on some "mini-projects" to get them familiar with the available computing facilities, and a programming language such as FORTRAN, C, or C++. Mathematical software such as Mathematica and Matlab will be introduced.

The students broke up into groups and worked with their mentor on their main project for the rest of the summer. Each group wrote a paper describing their project and results, and presented their results at a final session. The papers were written in LATEX (something else the participants had to learn!). During the summer, the students visited the "cave" at the Virtual Reality Applications Center and the Pioneer Seed Company, where biotechnological research is done.

Brian and Tina worked with Professors Gunzburger and Peterson on domain decomposition methods.

Marcus and Tony worked on Type II superconductivity with Professors Gunzburger and Peterson. After learning about superconductivity, they were given a finite element code which approximated the solution to the Ginzburg-Landau model for superconductivity. They performed numerical simulations and presented the results in a movie.

Jayadev, Ed and Daniel worked on computational molecular biology with Professor James Cornette. Jayadev continued to work on this problem after completion of the REU; his work resulted in an honors research paper, and a presentation at a local AMS meeting. Moreover, helping out with this project interested Todd Peterson so much that he ended up writing a master's thesis in computational biology.

At the end of the program the participants filled out an evaluation. Here are their responses to the question:

What would you say to a friend who was considering applying for this program for next year?

• "It's a good opportunity to learn without the structure of the classroom."
• "It's a great opportunity!"
• "I would say that it is a very positive experience and don't pass up the chance."
• "Absolutely would say do it. This was a great experience and I'm really glad that I was part of it."
• "Do it if interested in gaining computer programming experience."
• "Bring sheets."

Last Updated: 25 January 2001