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Please note: The University of Waterloo is closed for all events until further notice.

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

  1. July 17, 2020SAGT 2020 Best Paper Award
    SAGT 2020

    Jochen Koenemann, Kanstantsin Pashkovich and Natig Tofigzade were announced the recipients of the SAGT 2020 Best Paper Award for their paper "Approximating Stable Matchings with Ties of Bounded Size".

  2. July 1, 2020C&O welcomes four new faculty members
    Square

    The C&O department is very pleased to welcome four new faculty members, Assistant Professors Logan Crew, Stephen Melczer, Oliver Pechenik and Sophie Spirkl.

  3. June 30, 2020Jun Yan awarded an Alumni Gold Medal
    Jun Yan

    At the Spring convocation, Jun Yan was awarded an Alumni Gold Medal in recognition of his academic excellence during his undergraduate studies in Combinatorics & Optimization and Pure Mathematics. Jun Yan was also a recipient of the 2020 William Tutte Centenary Scholarship. 

Read all news

Events

  1. Aug. 17, 2020Algebraic Graph Theory Seminar - Gabriel Coutinho

    Title: State transfer and the size of the graph

    Speaker: Gabriel Coutinho
    Affiliation: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
    Zoom: Contact Soffia Arnadottir

    Abstract:

    If there is perfect state transfer between two vertices at distance d, how small can the graph be compared to d? This question is motivated by the fact that the known infinite families of graphs admitting state transfer at increasingly large distances are all obtained from graph products, thus their sizes grow exponentially compared to their diameter.

  2. Aug. 21, 2020Tutte Colloquium - Léo Ducas

    Title: An Algorithmic Reduction Theory for Binary Codes: LLL and more

    Joint work with Thomas Debris-Alazard and Wessel van Woerden

    Speaker: Léo Ducas
    Affiliation: Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI)
    Zoom: Please email Emma Watson

    Abstract:

    Lattice reduction is the task of finding a basis of short and somewhat orthogonal vectors of a given lattice. In 1985 Lenstra, Lenstra and Lovasz proposed a polynomial time algorithm for this task, with an application to factoring rational polynomials. Since then, the LLL algorithm has found countless application in algorithmic number theory and in cryptanalysis.

  3. Aug. 28, 2020Tutte Colloquium - Sophie Spirkl

    Title: Pure pairs

    Speaker: Sophie Spirkl
    Affiliation: University of Waterloo
    Zoom: Please email Emma Watson.

    Abstract:

    A pure pair in a graph G is a pair of subsets A and B of the vertex set such that between A and B, either all edges or no edges are present in G. This concept was first introduced in connected with the Erdos-Hajnal conjecture, but has since developed a life of its own. I will give an overview of results and open questions on pure pairs.

    Based on joint work with Maria Chudnovsky, Jacob Fox, Alex Scott, and Paul Seymour.

All upcoming events