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
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.
Spring 2023 Graduands
Congratulations to Clement Wan, MMath and Eric Boulter, PhD, who convocated in Spring 2023. Best of luck in your future endeavours!
Events
Geometry and Topology Seminar
Kuntal Banerjee, University of Waterloo
Very stable and wobbly loci for elliptic curves
We explore very stable and wobbly bundles, twisted in a particular sense by a line bundle, over complex algebraic curves of genus 1. We verify that twisted stable bundles on an elliptic curve are not very stable for any positive twist. We utilize semistability of trivially twisted very stable bundles to prove that the wobbly locus is always a divisor in the moduli space of semistable bundles on a genus 1 curve. We prove, by extension, a conjecture regarding the closedness and dimension of the wobbly locus in this setting. This conjecture was originally formulated by Drinfeld in higher genus.
MC 5501
Continuous Logic Learning Seminar
Joey Lakerdas-Gayle, University of Waterloo
Infinitary Continuous Logic
We will introduce continuous analogues of infinitary logic following a survey of Christopher Eagle. We will also look at the Scott analysis for metric structures developed by Ben Yaacov, Doucha, Nies, and Tsankov.
MC 5403
Joint Pure Math Department Colloquium & Probability Seminar
Mark Rudelson, University of Michigan
When a system of real quadratic equations has a solution
The existence and the number of solutions of a system of polynomial equations in n variables over an algebraically closed field is a classical topic in algebraic geometry. Much less is known about the existence of solutions of a system of polynomial equations over reals. Any such problem can be reduced to a system of quadratic equations by introducing auxiliary variables. Due to the generality of the problem, a computationally efficient algorithm for determining whether a real solution of a system of quadratic equations exists is believed to be impossible. We will discuss a simple and efficient sufficient condition for the existence of a solution. While the problem and the condition are of algebraic nature, the proof relies on Fourier analysis and concentration of measure.
Joint work with Alexander Barvinok.
MC 5501