The C&O department has 36 faculty members and 60 graduate students. We are intensely research oriented and hold a strong international reputation in each of our six major areas:
- Algebraic combinatorics
- Combinatorial optimization
- Continuous optimization
- Cryptography
- Graph theory
- Quantum computing
Read more about the department's research to learn of our contributions to the world of mathematics!

News
Laura Pierson wins Governor General's Gold Medal
The Governor General’s Gold Medal is one of the highest student honours awarded by the University of Waterloo.
Sepehr Hajebi wins Graduate Research Excellence Award, Mathematics Doctoral Prize, and finalist designation for Governor General's Gold Medal
The Mathematics Doctoral Prizes are given annually to recognize the achievement of graduating doctoral students in the Faculty of Mathematics. The Graduate Research Excellence Awards are given to students who authored or co-authored an outstanding research paper.
Three C&O faculty 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.
Events
Algebraic and enumerative combinatorics seminar-Elana Kalashnikov
Title:The Abelian/non-Abelian correspondence and Littlewood-Richardson
Speaker | Elana Kalashnikov |
Affiliation | University of Waterloo |
Location | MC 5479 |
Abstract:The Abelian/non-Abelian correspondence gives rise to a natural basis for the cohomology of flag varieties, which - except for Grassmannians - is distinct from the Schubert basis. I will describe this basis and its multiplication rules, and explain how to relate it to the Schubert basis for two-step flag varieties. I will then explain how this leads to new tableaux Littlewood--Richardson rules for many products of Schubert classes. This is joint work (separately) with Wei Gu and Linda Chen.
There will be a pre-seminar presenting relevant background at the beginning graduate level starting at 1:30pm,
Tutte colloquium-Sepehr Hajebi
Title:Complete bipartite induced minors (and treewidth)
Speaker: | Sepehr Hajebi |
Affiliation: | University of Waterloo |
Location: | MC 5501 |
Abstract:I will present a result that describes the unavoidable induced subgraphs of graphs with a large complete bipartite induced minor, and will discuss the connections and applications to bounding the treewidth in hereditary classes of graphs. If time permits, I will also sketch some proofs.
Joint work with Maria Chudnovsky and Sophie Spirkl.