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-Laura Pierson
Title:Power sum expansions for the Kromatic symmetric function
| Speaker | Laura Pierson |
| Affiliation | University of Waterloo |
| Location | MC 5479 |
Abstract:The Kromatic symmetric function was introduced by Crew, Pechenik, and Spirkl (2023) as a K-analogue of Stanley's chromatic symmetric function. While the chromatic symmetric function encodes proper colorings of a graph (where each vertex gets a color and adjacent vertices get different colors), the Kromatic symmetric function encodes proper set colorings (where each vertex gets a nonempty set of colors and adjacent vertices get non-overlapping color sets). The expansion of the chromatic symmetric function in the basis of power sum symmetric functions has several nice interpretations, including one in terms of source components of acyclic orientations, due to Bernardi and Nadeau (2020). We lift that expansion formula to give expansion formulas for the Kromatic symmetric function using a few different K-analogues of the power sum basis. Our expansions are based on Lyndon heaps, introduced by Lalonde (1995), which are representatives for certain equivalence classes of acyclic orientations on clan graphs (graphs formed from the original graph by removing vertices and adding extra copies of vertices).
There will be a pre-seminar presenting relevant background at the beginning graduate level starting at 1:30pm,
Tutte colloquium-Rose McCarty
Title:The first-order logic of graphs
| Speaker: | Rose McCarty |
| Affiliation: | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Location: | MC 5501 |
Abstract:Over the last ten years, many wonderful connections have been established between structural graph theory, computational complexity, and finite model theory. We give an overview of this area, focusing on recent progress towards understanding the "stable" case. We do not assume any familiarity with first-order logic
Algebraic Graph Theory-Eric Culver
Title: Two Distinct Eigenvalues from a New Graph Product
| Speaker: |
Eric Culver |
| Affiliation: | Brigham Young University |
| Location: | Please contact Sabrina Lato for Zoom link. |
Abstract:The parameter q(G) of a graph G is the minimum number of distinct eigenvalues of a symmetric matrix whose pattern is given by G. We introduce a novel graph product by which we construct new infinite families of graphs that achieve q(G)=2. Several graph families for which it is already known that q(G)=2 can also be thought of as arising from this new product.