Georgia Tech Undergraduate Mathematics

Blair Dowling (amath, graduating May 2002) is the president of the undergraduate math club, and conducting research on elliptic curves under the direction of Professor Tetali.

The past few summers, she has been involved with PROMYS a challenging program designed to encourage ambitious high school students to explore the creative world of mathematics. The program is based at Boston University. Each summer, approximately 60 high school students from around the country gather on the campus of Boston University for six weeks of rigorous mathematical activity. Through their intensive efforts to solve an assortment of unusually challenging problems in Number Theory, participants will practice the art of mathematical discovery.

This past summer, Blair Dowling was a counselor for the program. The duties she writes, were to grade the daily homework in Number Theory for three or four students. More importantly, counselors will be available to help students through informal discussions as questions arise. We rely on counselors to create an intense atmosphere of interaction crossing many levels of mathematical experience. Consistent with this goal, counselors and participants will be housed together on campus. In addition, the PROMYS counselor staff is invited to organize "mini-courses" on themes of their own choosing in order to introduce students to a broad variety of mathematical ideas. During the program, counselors are invited to study mathematics independently by participating in seminars and interacting individually with the faculty.

I was one of two head counselors for the program. As such, my duties included all those of a regular counselor, plus various administrative responsibilities - running counselor meetings, arranging for various scheduled activities to take place, dealing with any problems between the program and the university (residence halls), and basically making sure that things were running smoothly, taking care of any issues as they arose. Additionally, I ran a "mini-course" of four lectures on the subject of Cryptography, introducing students to secret and public-key systems, RSA, El-Gamal, zero- knowledge proofs, and secret-sharing, with special emphasis on the number theory behind some of these systems. To further my own mathematical education, I participated in a counselor seminar on Modular Forms, which met two or three times a week.

I feel that the program offers a unique experience of true immersion in rigorous mathematics and an excellent introduction to the logic and thought process which is so essential in higher math. My experiences with the program were positive, and I enjoyed working with exceptionally bright students, and learned a lot (both about math, and about working with students) in the process. 

Patty Pichardo (dmath, graduating May 2002) participated in a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU), and had a great time. The REU was at a well established program at the University of Puerto Rico, Humacao campus, a program with the highest largest number of participants among all REUs. It is headed by Professors Ivelisse Rubio (URH) and Herbert Medina (Loyola Marymount). She participated in a seminar on Computational Algebra, lead by Prof. Reinhard Laubenbacher.  The program is 6 weeks, divided into 2 weeks lecture and 4 weeks of research. They worked with a problem from Graph Theory proposed by Professor Strumfels, of Berkeley. They will present their work at the Science Fair held at the SACNAS Conference in Phoenix. In January, she will present in the AMS Joint Math Meeting, held conveniently in San Diego, with the aid of some travel money from sources at the School of Mathematics.  From Monday to Thursday they worked on their projects, and for the other three days, there were lots of activities, scientific and otherwise, including various Colloquium speakers throughout the program from different universities, such as UC Berkeley, Tulan, and the University of of Iowa. On Saturdays they went around the island. There was a welcome. After the closing banquet, they gave us a three more day stay with food and the villas (we actually stayed in a touristic area), and on the weekend and the Fourth of July the PR people took everyone that was interested to different other places in the island. (Can I go next summer? Please! --ML)
SIMU homepage	Patty Pichardo is third from the left
Erika Norenberg (amath, graduating May 2002) has Co- oped with Southern View Technologies, a networking firm, and interned with Watson and Wyatt, and Actuarial firm. In the Summer of 2001, she conducted research with Professor Brendan Nagle.	The Crypto seminar is being held Fall 2001, with participants Claire Conner, Michael Tiffany, Patty Pichardo (all dmaths) and Tye Howard (CoC). They are meeting with Professor Lacey to learn some of the mathematics behind popular encryption schemes, such as RSA, El Gamal, and Duffie-- Hellman.	Andrew Stimpson (Physics and amath, graduating December 2003) worked in the Quantum Computing Technologies group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA in the Spring and Summer of 2001. He writes "I attempted the first ever calculation of the thermal emissivity of a 3D photonic band gap crystal, mostly because I lacked any coursework in quantum mechanics, making working with any of the salient problems of quantum computing difficult."
Michael Tiffany (dmath and CoC, graduating May 2002) is Co-oping at Southern View Technologies, a national networking firm. He is also part of the Crypto Seminar.	Claire Conner (dmath, graduating summer 2002) is also Co-oping with New Energy Associates, a firm developing financial software for energy markets. (This is a very difficult and complicated task.) Claire is also Co-op representative to the Georgia Tech Student Government, and Co-op Club president	Clark Alexander (Amath and Physics) is working on a research project with Professor Harrell in the area of convex geometry. The specific problem concerns a long vexing question about convex bodies of constant width.

Animation Lab, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA

The summer of 1999, the summer of semester conversion, I had a lovely time on campus; I'd taken a job on campus with Jessica Hodgins in the Animation Lab. She was doing physical simulation, and they found a small software task that took me most of the ten weeks I had to implement. I learned a smidgen of Perl, a lot about concurrency and did some minor software development. I wasn't terribly excited with the task, and often wandered off to learn more about tangential subjects. My mentor was busy with his own work, but I liked the atmosphere, and I got to perform in DramaTech's summer production of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead". I very much enjoyed the summer.
High Performance Systems Lab, Hewlett-Packard Co., Richardson, TX

For the Spring and Summer of 2000 I worked for Hewlett-Packard's High Performance Systems Lab (formerly Convex Computer Corporation).

I interviewed with a group doing boot firmware for their high-end supercomputers - formerly the PARISC based V2x00 series, but the project I was hired for was based on the IA-64 architecture.

They had given me the incentive that if I decided to come for two work terms in a row, they could give me a really juicy project to work on. Unfortunately, I hit the group at the wrong time. They were just coming off a former project and I got to watch a dozen engineers try to contemplate an entirely new hardware and instruction architecture, and fit their heads around half a dozen industry standards. I spent most of my days reading slashdot and drinking coffee.

It gave me a horrible feeling because there was this gigantic problem that I felt compelled to work on, to try to understand, to produce something useful to help with, but we were trying to write boot code for a machine that didn't exist -- for which the specifications weren't solid, and some weren't even available.

I did get to do a couple of small projects; I helped the team implement CVS as its version control system and also reworked their build system.

Also, be very wary of finding a roommate through bulletin boards. It can be a very dangerous thing. You're much safer getting a place of your own, or even better moving in with someone you know or someone from work.
 

Extreme Blue Internship , IBM, Austin, TX

This job by far had the most perks of any I have held. It is IBM's effort to attract the best and brightest. The idea is to create exciting projects and through several technical interns and an MBA on it.

The perhaps most spectacular thing about this job was the quality of mentors. My mentor was Bishop Brock from the Austin Research Lab. He and his colleagues are focused mainly on microprocessor research. Bishop takes a chunk of time off every few years and tours around the world. He's cycled over 10,000 miles through Asia and Africa. He's done research in automated theorem proving systems, processor design, and microkernels.

You'll find lots of the best and brightest in IBM's research labs. It's one of the last great corporate research strongholds. Xerox PARC has dried up, Bell Labs (Lucent) has been slashed severely, Microsoft has a few token people, but questionable further investment; overall IBM has good support for research, even in a time of economic downturn such as this.

My project involved a new microprocessor and modifying Linux and the software stack on top of Linux for this device. It's one of my big interests, so I had a really good time. Unfortunately, I really can't say much about my project due to my NDA.

The working hours were sort of insane. I averaged 60 hours a week, but then, I was doing really neat things with really good people, so I didn't mind. Austin is awfully hot though.

 
Perks:
 + Very exciting projects to work on
 + Got to meet top IBM executives
     Lou Gerstner, CEO and Chairman of the Board;
     Nick Donofrio, Senior Vice President, Technology 
& Manufacturing
     Stuart Feldman, Director of Computer Science Research
     Mark Dean, IBM Fellow and Vice President of Systems 
Research
     Jeff Smith, Senior Vice President of Tivoli 
Application Products
     Lisa Su, Director of Emerging Products
     (this list went on and on)
 + Got trained in business presentations in front of high executives who
   control the budget
 + Got flown up to Armonk, NY (IBM Headquarters and the IBM learning
   center) for a two day career fair / presentation of projects to 
all of
   the big wigs, and pampered in one of the nicest hotels I've ever 
seen.
   Ever.
 + Housing provided
 + Work area was a old machine room (mm, reconfigurable floors and
   outlets to create really cool surround sound movie theater 
atmosphere
   and late night music lounge atmosphere, often cold as the arctic 
circle
   in a town that was 40+ days above 100 F)
 + 1500 Mhz Workstation, 700 Mhz laptop,
   experimental hardware for which to develop
 + Free sodas, chips, grain bars, coffee, tea, hot cocoa
 + Frequent outings for sushi / movies / random local events
 + Trip on Lake Austin
 + Occasional free meals
 + Taken out for drinks by your boss and mentors
 + Access to top researchers

I'm attending this program in the Spring. It is a one or two semester program of courses taught by eminent Hungarian mathematicians. The courses are in English. One needs to apply for the program in advance, and get a Visa in order.

On Tech campus, you need to get a pre-approval form for the courses you will take and take it to the relevant departments to determine which courses will transfer as what. Then you need to submit that form to the registrar. If you are studying abroad late in your career as I am, you also need to fill out a petition to the faculty to waive the 36 hour rule (your last 36 credit hours have to be taken at Georgia Tech), as the Budapest program is not sponsored directly through Tech. Also, you may be dropped from Georgia Tech rolls if you are out too long, so you may have to apply for readmission. If you are in good standing, this is a rubber-stamp procedure.

Total cost for one semester: $7450 ($3,000-$4,000 less than Tech for out of state students)