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
C&O Reading Group -Jacob Skitsko
Title: Fault Tolerant Routing and High Dimensional Expanders
| Speaker: | Jacob Skitsko |
| Affiliation: | University of Waterloo |
| Location: | MC 6029 |
Abstract: We will go over some recent results about fault tolerant routing from Bafna, Minzer, Vyas. Two parallel series of works from the last few years from Bafna, Lifshitz, Minzer, Vyas as well as Dikstein, Dinur, Lubotzky has led to size efficient PCPs by using high dimensional expanders. We will comment on the context for these works, and briefly go over some high level ideas. Then, we will talk about an application to fault tolerant rounding. The goal in this problem is to design a sparse network supporting efficient fault tolerant interactions between all pairs of nodes. Using the size efficient PCP construction, Bafna and Minzer gave a construction of constant degree networks with efficient protocols that tolerate a constant fraction of adversarial edge faults.
Algebraic and enumerative combinatorics seminar-Leo Jiang
Title:Oriented graded Möbius algebras
| Speaker | Leo Jiang |
| Affiliation | University of Toronto |
| Location | MC 5479 |
Abstract:The graded Möbius algebra B(M) of a matroid M contains much combinatorial information about the flats of M. Its algebraic properties were instrumental in the proof of the Dowling—Wilson top-heavy conjecture. We will introduce a skew-commutative analogue OB(M) associated to every oriented matroid M, and discuss its algebraic structure. This is part of ongoing work joint with Yu Li.
There will be a pre-seminar presenting relevant background at the beginning graduate level starting at 1:30pm,
Tutte colloquium-Gary Au
Title:Worst-case instances of the stable set problem of graphs for the Lovász–Schrijver SDP hierarchy
| Speaker: | Gary Au |
| Affiliation: | University of Saskatchewan |
| Location: | MC 5501 |
Abstract:(Based on joint work with Levent Tunçel.)
In this talk, we discuss semidefinite relaxations of the stable set problem of graphs generated by the lift-and-project operator LS_+ (due to Lovász and Schrijver), and present some of our recent progress on this front. In particular, we show that for every positive integer k, the smallest graph with LS_+-rank k contains exactly 3k vertices. This result is sharp and settles a conjecture posed by Lipták and Tunçel from 2003.
The talk will be accessible to a general audience, and does not assume any prior knowledge of lift-and-project methods.