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
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.
Prof. Alfred Menezes is named Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research
The Fellows program, which was established in 2004, is awarded to no more than 0.25% of the IACR’s 3000 members each year and recognizes “outstanding IACR members for technical and professional contributions to cryptologic research.”
C&O student Ava Pun receives Jessie W. H. Zou Memorial Award
She received the award in recognition of her research on simulating virtual training environments for autonomous vehicles, which she conducted at the start-up Waabi.
Events
Algebraic and enumerative combinatorics seminar-Nick Olson-Harris
Title:Sufficient conditions for equality of skew Schur functions
Speaker | Nick Olson-Harris |
Affiliation | University of Waterloo |
Location | MC 5479 |
Abstract: : A pair of skew shapes are said to be skew equivalent if they admit the same number of semistandard Young tableaux of each weight, or in other words if the skew Schur functions they define are equal. A conjecture of McNamara and van Willigenburg gives necessary and sufficient combinatorial conditions for shapes to be skew equivalent, but neither direction was known to hold in general. We prove sufficiency. The techniques used are Hopf-algebraic in spirit and extend ideas used by Yeats to prove a simple case.
There will be a pre-seminar presenting relevant background at the beginning graduate level starting at 1pm,
C&O Reading Group - Parth Mittal
Title:Nearly optimal communication and query complexity of bipartite matching
Speaker: | Parth Mittal |
Affiliation: | University of Waterloo |
Location: | MC 6029 |
Abstract:I will talk about a recent paper (Blikstad, van den Brand, Efron, Mukhopadhyay, Nanongkai, FOCS 22) which gives near-optimal algorithms for bipartite matching (and several generalizations) in communication complexity, and several types of query complexity. We will focus only on the simplest case (i.e. unweighted bipartite matching),and will not assume any background on communication or query complexity.
Tutte colloquium-Subhadip Singha
Title: Concrete analysis of a few aspects of lattice-based cryptography
Speaker: | Subhadip Singha |
Affiliation: | University of Waterloo |
Location: | MC 5501 |
Abstract: A seminal 2013 paper by Lyubashevsky, Peikert, and Regev proposed using ideal lattices as a foundation for post-quantum cryptography, supported by a polynomial-time security reduction from the approximate Shortest Independent Vectors Problem (SIVP) to the Decision Learning With Errors (DLWE) problem in ideal lattices. In our concrete analysis of this multi-step reduction, we find that the reduction’s tightness gap is so significant that it undermines any meaningful security guarantees. Additionally, we have concerns about the feasibility of the quantum aspect of the reduction in the near future. Moreover, when making the reduction concrete, the approximation factor for the SIVP problem turns out to be much larger than anticipated, suggesting that the approximate SIVP problem may not be hard for the proposed cryptosystem parameters.