Bicentennial Professor of Mathematics
Department Associate Chair
Amherst CollegeDepartment of Mathematics and Statistics
Amherst, MA 01002
Amanda Folsom
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Amherst, MA 01002
Summer Undergraduate Research in Number Theory at Amherst College
2024 (click here for more info.): I advised undergraduates from Amherst College on an original research project in pure mathematics (number theory) during the summer of 2024. Amherst students were invited to submit a formal application; funding is provided by NSF Grant DMS-2200728, and/or Amherst College.
Student participants: John Joire '26, Torin Steciuk '26, Alexandre van Lidth '26
Results: TBA
2023 (click here for more info.): I advised undergraduates from Amherst College on an original research project in pure mathematics (number theory) during the summer of 2023. Amherst students were invited to submit a formal application; funding is provided by NSF Grant DMS-2200728.
Student participants: David Metacarpa '24, Wenche Tseng '24
Results: A. Folsom and D. Metacarpa, Quantum q-series and mock theta functions, Research in the Mathematical Sciences 11 no. 41 (2024), 21pp.
2021 (click here for more info.): I advised a small group of undergraduates from Amherst College on an original research project in pure mathematics (number theory) during the summer of 2021. Amherst students were invited to submit a formal application; funding is provided by NSF Grant DMS-1901791.
Student participants: Anna Dietrich '22, Keane Ng '23, Chloe Stewart '22, Shixiong (Leo) Xu '23.
Results/Paper: A.M. Dietrich, A. Folsom, K. Ng, C. Stewart, and S. Xu, Overpartition ranks and quantum modular forms, Research in Number Theory 8:45 (2022). 16pp.
MAA Outstanding Student Paper Session Award, MAA-Mathfest 2021
2020 (click here for more info.): I advised a small group of undergraduates from Amherst College on an original research project in pure mathematics during the summer of 2020. Amherst students were invited to submit a formal application; funding is provided by NSF Grant DMS-1901791.
Student participants: Elizabeth Pratt ’22, Noah Solomon ’22, Andrew Tawfeek ‘21E.
Results/Paper: A. Folsom, E. Pratt, N. Solomon, and A.R. Tawfeek, Quantum Jacobi form and sums of tails identities, Research in Number Theory, 8:8 (2022). 24pp.
MAA Outstanding Undergraduate Student Poster Session Award, Joint Mathematics Meetings 2021(Poster 22)
2018 (click here for more info.): I advised a small group of undergraduates from Amherst College on an original research project in pure mathematics during the summer of 2018. Students were invited to submit a formal application; funding is provided by NSF CAREER Grant DMS-1449679, and Amherst College.
Student participants: Greg Carroll ’20, James Corbett ’19, Ellie Thieu ’19.
Results/Paper: G. Carroll ’19, J. Corbett ’19, A. Folsom, and E. Thieu ’19. “Universal mock theta functions as quantum Jacobi forms,” Research in the Mathematical Sciences, 6:6 (2019), 15pp.
2017 (click here for more info.): I advised a small group of undergraduates from Amherst College on an original research project in pure mathematics during the summer of 2017. Students were invited to submit a formal application; funding was provided by NSF CAREER Grant DMS-1449679.
Student participants: Michael Barnett ’18, Jack Wesley ’18, Obinna Ukogu ’18, Hui Xu ‘18.
Results/Paper: “Quantum Jacobi forms and balanced unimodal sequences,” Journal of Number Theory 186 (2018), 16-34.
Undergraduate Student Paper Session Award MAA-Mathfest 2017, Chicago IL
2015 (click here for more info.): I advised a small group of undergraduates from Amherst College on an original research project in pure mathematics during the summer of 2015. Students were invited to submit a formal application; funding was provided by NSF CAREER Grant DMS-1449679.
Student participants: Caleb Ki ‘17, Yen Nhi Truong Vu ‘17, and Bowen Yang ‘18.
Results/Paper: “Strange combinatorial quantum modular forms,” Journal of Number Theory 170 (2017), 315-346.
Undergraduate Student Paper Session Award MAA-Mathfest 2015, Washington DC
S.U.M.R.Y. at Yale University
Sam Payne and I co-created S.U.M.R.Y. at Yale (Summer Undergraduate Mathematics Research at Yale). We offered funded positions for ~twenty Yale students to work on carefully chosen open problems in the mathematical sciences, guided by a small group of graduate student mentors and postdoc coordinators, and directed by Sam and me. Further information is here, and a Yale Daily News article is here.
Students advised (by me): Youkow Homma ‘16, Benjamin Tong ‘17, and Jun Hwan Ryu ’16.
Results/Paper: “On a general class of non-squashing partitions,” Discrete Math. 229 (2016), 25pp.
Undergraduate Student Paper Session Award MAA-Mathfest 2014, Portland, OR
E.Y.E. on Mathematics: Edgewood-Yale Educational Outreach Initiative
Building from my experience with the Yale National Initiative, I developed a mathematics enrichment program at the Edgewood School in New Haven, CT, a K-8 public school, in partnership with the Edgewood principal and Mathematics faculty. Through creative mathematics projects, I led supplementary-to-classroom mathematics seminars every other week for 5th grade students, emphasizing the “3 pillars of mathematics” (after Roger Howe, Yale), essential for sustained and effective learning.
The YNI functions to strengthen teaching in public schools, and is an intensive and sustained collaboration among Yale faculty members and public school teachers from across the United States. In the summer of 2011, I co-led a seminar for teachers with Roger Howe on “Great Ideas in Mathematics”.
Yale-New Haven Mathcounts Outreach
I served as a faculty co-advisor to Mathcounts Outreach, the Yale-New Haven chapter of the national Mathcounts program. Mathcounts functions to enhance achievement in middle school mathematics, through extracurricular activities, lessons, competitions, and fairs.
Undergraduate mathematics research NSF REU at University of Wisconsin
Ken Ono has run a National Science Foundation REU since 2003; for four summers 2007-10, I was an instructor at this REU (which at the time took place at U. Wisconsin-Madison). I advised small groups of undergraduate students from various U.S. institutions (and the occasional advanced high school student) towards writing their own original math research papers in Number Theory.