We recommend that The Templeton Foundation fund six experimental tuition and support scholarships to enable students from targeted low cost universities and non-North American universities to attend the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics Program.

The Budapest Semesters in Mathematics Program enrolls about sixty-five students from North American colleges and universities each semester to study advanced undergraduate mathematics in Budapest. The average home school grade point average of our fall class is 3.89/4.0 and most of our students are in there third year of undergraduate work. Currently, BSM is at (or slightly above) its comfortable carrying capacity and managing the growth of the program while maintaining quality has been a top priority for the program directors. Six years ago we developed a globalization plan that has remained unimplemented due to continuing student demand from North American students.

However, the range of home schools of participating students leads us to believe that there is a large pool of highly talented students who donŐt apply to BSM for financial reasons. For students at private liberal arts colleges and elite universities participation tends to be inexpensive when compared to the cost of the home school. This is not the case at low cost universities where local costs are far below the cost of a semester at BSM. The present proposal for six tuition and support scholarships will enable us to see if we can attract students from this pool to the program.

In the event that BSM offers any financial support to students BSM will significantly alter its 5013C status and the amount of reporting paper work required by the U.S. government. As such, we will investigate alternative means of providing such aid such as asking the American Mathematical Society or the Mathematical Association of America to create a scholarship panel that would handle to actual distribution of funds. My preliminary discussions with both groups indicate thaty they would be excited about doing this for us. Alternatively, Templeton itself by set up such a scholarship board.

We would view our efforts as an experiment and use the results to help guide future plans for expansion as well as for fund raising. We plan to target two groups: 1.) public land grant universities in the United States and 2.) a variety of high quality undergraduate institutions on the Indian subcontinent.