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
Crypto Reading Group - Pranshu Kumar-Generic Transformations for Updatable PKEs
Abstract:Updatable Public-Key Encryption (UPKE) augments the security of PKE with Forward Secrecy properties. It was originally proposed by Jost et al. (EUROCRYPT 2019) to provide security guarantees in secure messaging applications efficiently. Later, Alwen et al. (CRYPTO 2020) showed that TreeKEM, when used for Continuous Group Key Agreement (CGKA) in Message Layer Security (MLS), failed to achieve adequate security and proposed using UPKEs to modify TreeKEM. Since then, UPKEs have become a part of the Message Layer Security specification, and their security properties have been extensively studied. Alwen, Fuchsbauer, and Mularczyk (AFM, Eurocrypt’24) presented the strongest security notion to date, adding many additional properties that strengthen its security in CGKA and MLS. |
Tutte Colloquium -Bruno Sterner-Large smooth twins from short lattice vectors
| Speaker: | Bruno Sterner |
| Affiliation: | University of Waterloo |
| Location: | MC 5501 |
Abstract: We discuss the challenging problem of finding pairs of consecutive smooth integers, which we refer to as a smooth twin. In other words the largest prime factor in the twin is relatively small. This computational number theoretic problem has appeared in the context of isogeny-based cryptography whereby a select number of cryptosystems use such twins as part of their parameter setup. The challenging part to the problem is finding smooth twins whose largest prime factor is as small as possible. Prior to this work, twins of this nature have at most 74-bits which is much too small for cryptographic relevance. We bridge this gap by presenting a new method that finds significantly larger smooth twins with as small as possible smoothness bound. The idea of our algorithm is based on the well known and studied problem of finding short vectors in a well constructed lattice. We report a 196-bit smooth twin which falls in this regime as well as a few larger twins that have small (but not the smallest) smoothness bounds.
Algebraic Graph Theory-Zhaochen Ding-A construction of multicovers of a cycle
| Speaker: | Zhaochen Ding |
| Affiliation: |
University of Primorska |
| Location: | Please contact Sabrina Lato for Zoom link. |
Abstract: Praeger-Xu graphs are a family of multicovers of cycles, known for some of their surprising properties. A fundamental observation is that these graphs can be constructed from De Bruijn graphs. In this presentation, we will generalize the definition of De Bruijn graphs to create a broader family of multicovers. Finally, we will compute the automorphism group and show some applications of our constructions. This is a joint work with Ci Xuan Wu.