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
Sina Kalantarzadeh 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.
Two 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.
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.
Events
Algebraic and Enumerative combinatorics seminar - Sergio Alejandro Fernandez de Soto Guerrero-New combinatorial possibilities to describe (quotients of) positroids
| Speaker: | Sergio Alejandro Fernandez de Soto Guerrero |
| Affiliation: | TU Graz |
| Location: | MC 5479 |
AbstractPositroids were introduced by Postnikov in 2006 as a special class of matroids with nice combinatorial properties. Since 2008, starting with Suho Ho, several attempts have been made to describe the poset of quotients for this class of matroids in a combinatorial way. However, these descriptions are incomplete and always come from the same perspective. That is why we will explore new combinatorial objects and the context in which they arise (magic, polytopes, and antisymmetric algebras) to see if it is possible to describe this poset.
There will be a pre-seminar presenting relevant background at beginning graduate level starting at 1:30pm in MC 5417.
Crypto Reading Group - Pranshu Kumar & John Premkumar & Karaneh Keypoor-Quasi-Cyclic Codes
Abstract: This session is devoted to quasi-cyclic codes, one of the main structured code families used in modern code-based cryptography. We will introduce their definition and main properties, and explain why their additional algebraic structure is both useful for efficiency and delicate from a security perspective. This week will provide the background needed to understand HQC and related constructions.
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Tutte Colloquium -Sergio Alejandro Fernandez de Soto Guerrero-Positriodal Magic
| Speaker: | Sergio Alejandro Fernandez de Soto Guerrero |
| Affiliation: | TU Graz |
| Location: | MC 5501 |
Abstract: Positroids are a subclass of matroids born in the study of the non-negative Grassmanian by Postnikov in 2006. Since then, there have been a plethora of combinatorial objects indexing positroids, two of these being the families of decorated and bicolored permutations, which are generalizations of classical permutations. These two families can be used to study properties of positroids, and as a byproduct we end up with useful ways to describe a group action on a deck of cards. In this context, we give a definition of invariants under this group action allowing us, as an application, to develop new magic tricks with unusual ways of shuffling cards.