Project Grant 2548038

The National Science Foundation Division of Mathematical Sciences awarded Kansas State University $362,021 on August 1, 2026, under the Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049) to operate the REU SITE: Summer Undergraduate Mathematics Research at Kansas State University (SUMAR at K-State) program.

The award funds a ten-week summer research program that recruits ten undergraduate students annually to conduct mentored mathematics research on the Kansas State campus in Manhattan, Kansas. Students, preferentially selected from institutions with limited research opportunities, work in three teams of roughly equal size under faculty mentors on projects spanning homological algebra, applied mathematics, analytic number theory, logic, and differential topology. Each student team meets with its faculty mentor at least once weekly, attends workshops and extracurricular activities, develops publishable research results, and presents findings as posters at undergraduate research conferences. Example project topics include homotopy lemmas for A-infinity coalgebras, nondestructive imaging of photonic crystals using sampling methods, differential equations in automorphic forms, agent-based models for formal verification, and degenerate critical points of smooth functions on three-dimensional manifolds.

The program operates through July 31, 2029, with annual cycles of student recruitment, seven-week research engagement, and conference presentation. Three faculty mentors design and oversee student projects each year, with some workshops jointly hosted through Kansas State's broader summer research program infrastructure.