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Welcome to Combinatorics and Optimization
Winter 2020 Undergraduate Research Assistantship (URA) Opportunities.
Spring 2020 Undergraduate Research Assistantship Program (URA). ***ON-LINE APPICATIONS OPEN November 1, 2019.***
Tutte's Distinguished Lecture Series
The very successful Tutte's 100th Distinguished Lecture Series has now completed. That success has led to a Tutte Distinguished Lecture once per term. The next lecture will happen in the Spring term.
*Recordings of occurred talks are all available on C&O's YouTube Channel.
Grad Studies: Fall 2020 applications now open
New Deadline: February 1, '20
News
- Sep. 24, 2020Creating opportunities in cryptography
“I was never the type to plan out my career,” says Alfred Menezes, a professor in the Department of Combinatorics & Optimization (C&O) at the University of Waterloo. “It’s always been about being in the right place at the right time and taking advantage of every opportunity.” In 1998 Menezes resigned a tenured position at Auburn University to join the Faculty of Mathematics at Waterloo, where he had previously earned three degrees, including his PhD.
- Sep. 11, 2020The profound impact of a researcher
Remembering Scott Vanstone and tracing his connections, influence and career
In 1972, Scott Vanstone (BMath '70, MMath '71, PhD '74) walked into Ron Mullin’s (MA '60, PhD '64) office and told him he wanted to be his student. Originally, Scott started studying chemistry at the University of Waterloo, but switched to math.
- Sep. 10, 2020Chasing a dream
“While working as an instructional support assistant (ISA), I remember the first time a professor asked for a volunteer to teach a lecture while he was at a conference,” remembers Josué Kurke. “My hand shot up. I donned a professorial kind of jacket with the elbow patches and went all out. Over time, I’ve realized that I feel most at home in front of a classroom. I want to spend my career talking to people about math.”
Events
- Sep. 28, 2020Algebraic Graph Theory Seminar - Soffia Arnadottir
Title: Strongly cospectral vertices, Cayley graphs and other things
Speaker: Soffia Arnadottir Affiliation: University of Waterloo Zoom: Contact Soffia Arnadottir Abstract:
In this talk we will look at a connection between the number of pairwise strongly cospectral vertices in a translation graph (a Cayley graph of an abelian group) and the multiplicities of its eigenvalues. We will use this connection to give an upper bound on the number of pairwise strongly cospectral vertices in cubelike graphs.
- Oct. 2, 2020Tutte Colloquium - Levent Tuncel
Title: Total Dual Integrality for Convex, Semidefinite and Extended Formulations
Speaker: Levent Tuncel Affiliation: University of Waterloo Zoom: Please email Emma Watson Abstract:
Within the context of characterizations of exactness of convex relaxations of 0,1 integer programming problems, we present a notion of total dual integrality for Semidefinite Optimization Problems (SDPs), convex optimization problems and extended formulations of convex sets.
- Nov. 5, 2020Algebraic Combinatorics Seminar - Huda Ahmed and Michael Feigen
Title: Filtering Grassmannian cohomology via k-Schur functions
Speakers: Huda Ahmed and Michael Feigen Affiliation: Zoom: Contact Karen Yeats Abstract:
This talk concerns the cohomology rings of complex Grassmannians. In 2003, Reiner and Tudose conjectured the form of the Hilbert series for certain subalgebras of these cohomology rings. We build on their work in two ways. First, we prove “half” of their conjecture, using notions from the theory of k-Schur functions. Second we formulate an analogous conjecture for Lagrangian Grassmannians.