
Welcome to Pure Mathematics
We are home to 30 faculty, four staff, approximately 60 graduate students, several research visitors, and numerous undergraduate students. We offer exciting and challenging programs leading to BMath, MMath and PhD degrees. We nurture a very active research environment and are intensely devoted to both ground-breaking research and excellent teaching.
News
Pure Math Department celebrates undergraduate achievement at awards tea
On March 24, the department of Pure Mathematics held its annual Undergraduate Awards Tea, an event that celebrates the accomplishments of its remarkable undergraduate students.
Two Pure Math professors win Outstanding Performance Awards
The awards are given each year to faculty members across the University of Waterloo who demonstrate excellence in teaching and research.
Pure Math PhD student wins Amit and Meena Chakma Award for Exceptional Teaching
The award ($1000), which is given to up to four recipients annually, recognizes excellence in teaching by students, including intellectual vigour, skill in communication and presentation of subject matter, and concern for the needs of students.
Events
Harmonic Analysis Learning Seminar
Jashan Bal, University of Waterloo
Veech's theorem
We present Veech's theorem which states that for every nontrivial locally compact group there exists a compact Hausdorff space on which it acts continuously and freely. As a consequence, we obtain that no nontrivial locally compact group is extremely amenable.
MC 5403
Analysis Seminar
Kieran Mastel, University of Waterloo
The weighted algebra approach to constraint system games
Entanglement allows for correlations between spatially separated experiments that are not possible classically. One way to study the computational power of entanglement is via nonlocal games. I will discuss my recent works with Eric Culf and William Slofstra on constraint system games. Different types of perfect entangled strategies for these games can be understood as representations of the algebra of the underlying constraint system. The weighted algebra formalism, introduced by Slofstra and me, extends this to non-perfect strategies. Using this formalism we can show that classical reductions between constraint systems are sound against quantum provers, which allows us to prove the RE-completeness of some constraint system games and to show that MIP* admits two prover perfect zero knowledge proofs.
MC 5417
Analysis Seminar
Kieran Mastel, University of Waterloo
Analysis Seminar: Measured groupoids and the Choquet-Deny property
A countable discrete group is called Choquet-Deny if for every non-degenerate probability measure on the group, the corresponding space of bounded harmonic functions is trivial. Recently a complete characterization of Choquet-Deny groups was obtained by Frisch, Hartman, Tamuz and Ferdowsi. In this talk, we will look at the extension of the Choquet-Deny property to the framework of discrete measured groupoids. Our main result gives a complete characterisation of this property in terms of the associated measured equivalence relation and the isotropy groups of the groupoid. This talk is based on a joint work with Tey Berendschot, Milan Donvil, Mario Klisse and Se-Jin Kim.
MC 5417 or Join on Zoom