The Directed Reading Program is a program of Stanford's Graduate Mathematics Outreach Organization in which undergraduate students (of any major) interested in independently reading some mathematics outside of their official coursework are paired for a quarter with math graduate students for weekly guidance and discussions. At the end of the quarter, participants gather for a colloquium in which each participant gives a short talk about their reading. The program began in winter quarter 2017.
The application for the Spring 2024 DRP is available here. The application is due Tuesday April 16 at 11:59 PM PDT. If you'd like to receive announcements about the program in the future, please subscribe to our mailing list.
Each quarter,
The guiding principle is informality: this is a way for everyone to learn new things, meet new people, and explore new areas in a friendly and casual environment. This is not to say that people should not learn serious math, but a DRP project is not supposed to be like another math course or even like a reading course with a faculty member—more like independent reading with a bit of guidance. In particular, the DRP is independent of the Stanford Math Department curriculum and does not confer academic credit.
One of the explicit goals of the program is to provide a streamlined way for undergraduate students to participate in the larger mathematical community and to gain mathematical cultural capital. We welcome applications from all Stanford undergraduates interested in mathematics, and women and members of other underrepresented groups are especially encouraged to apply.
This program is organized and run by a committee of mathematics graduate students. The current organizers are Jared Marx-Kuo, Alexandra Stavrianidi, Talia Blum, and Milo Marsden. Please feel free to email the organizers with any questions or concerns.
The DRP concept is based on that of similar programs at other institutions, going back to the first DRP started in 2003 at UChicago. There is now a national DRP network which maintains a list of resources and information about DRPs.
The Math DRP is administered under the auspices of Stanford's Graduate Mathematics Outreach Organization. We are very grateful to Stanford's Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education (VPGE) for supporting the DRP through its Student Projects for Intellectual Community Enhancement (SPICE) and Diversity and Inclusion Innovation Funds (DIF) grants. We would also like to thank the staff of the Stanford Mathematics Department for invaluable administrative and logistical support.
| Mentor | Student(s) | |
| Talia Blum | Eban Ebssa | |
| Spencer Dembner | Álvaro Díaz Ramos | |
| Michael Feldman | Lucas Perry | |
| Shintaro Fushida-Hardy | Eugenie Shi and Iris Zhou | |
| Hikari Iwasaki | Lisa Liu | |
| Eric Kilgore | Claire Munting Fernandez | |
| Matt Larson | Jacob Stavrianos and Kenneth Kohn | |
| Sammy Luo | Abhishek Vangipuram and Alexander Waitz | |
| Milo Marsden | Margot Hutchins | |
| Jared Marx-Kuo | Rayhan Razzak | |
| Maya Sankar | Edwin Xie | |
| Christian Serio | Senem Isik and Benjamin Yan | |
| Romain Jacques Higham Speciel | Judy Liu and Nika Zahedi | |
| Alexandra Stavrianidi | Zhengbo Xiang | |
| Matt Tyler | Christy Thompson | |
| João César Campos Vargas | Karthik Jetty | |
| Yunkun Zhou | Ruosong Gao |
See the list of participants and topics in previous quarters.
The following is a list of abstract booklets from the final presentation sessions in previous quarters. Prospective participants may like to take a look to get an idea about what topics past participants have studied. (Note that in most cases, time constraints mean that each final presentation is only able to scratch the surface of the material that the participant studied!)
Undergraduates in math and allied fields may also be interested in the following programs and resources: