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 - Mahrud Sayrafi- Constructing exceptional collections for toric varieties
| Speaker: | Mahrud Sayrafi |
| Affiliation: | McMaster University |
| Location: | MC 5417 |
Abstract: Exceptional collections are a powerful tool for understanding the derived category of coherent sheaves on algebraic varieties, with applications in commutative algebra, birational geometry, and mirror symmetry. While the existence of exceptional collections is known for classical varieties such as Grassmannians and flag varieties, constructing explicit collections for toric varieties presents challenges in combinatorial algebraic geometry. In this talk I will describe a computational approach to constructing full strong exceptional collections consisting of complexes of line bundles for toric varieties. No background in derived categories is assumed.
There will be a pre-seminar presenting relevant background at the beginning graduate level starting at 1:30pm.
Tutte Colloquium - Tamas Schwarcz- Interaction between skew-representability, tensor products, extension properties, and rank inequalities
| Speaker: | Tamas Schwarcz |
| Affiliation: | London School of Economics |
| Location: | MC 5501 |
Abstract: The study of matroid tensor products dates back to the 1970s, extending the tensor operation from linear algebra to the combinatorial setting. While any two matroids representable over the same field admit a tensor product via the Kronecker product of matrices, Las Vergnas showed that such products do not exist for matroids in general, leaving the area underexplored. In this work, we utilize this operation to study skew-representability — representation over division rings that need not be commutative — by proving that a matroid is skew-representable if and only if it admits iterated tensor products with specific test matroids. A key consequence is the existence of algorithmic certificates for non-representability. We further show that every rank-3 matroid admits a tensor product with any uniform matroid, constructing the unique freest such product. Finally, we demonstrate the power of this framework by deriving the first known linear rank inequality for (folded skew-)representable matroids that is independent of the common information property.