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
Tutte Colloquium - Tracy Chin
Title: Valuated Delta Matroids and Principal Minors
| Speaker: | Tracy Chin |
| Affiliation: | University of Washington |
| Location: | MC 5501 |
Abstract: Delta matroids are a generalization of matroids that arise naturally from combinatorial objects such as matchings, ribbon graphs, and principal minors of symmetric and skew symmetric matrices. In this talk, we will define valuated delta matroids and explore their connection with principal minors of Hermitian matrices, generalizing work by Rincón on valuated even delta matroids and skew symmetric matrices. Based on joint work with Nathan Cheung, Gaku Liu, and Cynthia Vinzant.
Algebraic Graph Theory-Chris Godsil
Title: Eigenpolytopes
| Speaker: | Chris Godsil |
| Affiliation: |
University of Waterloo |
| Location: | Please contact Sabrina Lato for Zoom link. |
Abstract: Each eigenspace of a graph gives rise to a real convex polytope. This connection works best for highly regular graphs - distance-regular graphs or, more generally, walk-regular graphs. I will discuss this relationship and give some applications, including a proof of the Erdos-Ko-Rado theorem.
Crypto Reading Group -Yuheng (Elle) Wen
Title:Seems Legit: Automated Analysis of Subtle Attacks on Protocols that Use Signatures
| Speaker | Yuheng (Elle) Wen |
| Affiliation | University of Waterloo |
| Location | MC 5479 |
Abstract: The standard definition of security for digital signatures—existential unforgeability—does not ensure certain properties that protocol designers might expect. For example, in many modern signature schemes, one signature may verify against multiple distinct public keys. It is left to protocol designers to ensure that the absence of these properties does not lead to attacks. Modern automated protocol analysis tools are able to provably exclude large classes of attacks on complex real-world protocols such as TLS 1.3 and 5G. However, their abstraction of signatures (implicitly) assumes much more than existential unforgeability, thereby missing several classes of practical attacks. We give a hierarchy of new formal models for signature schemes that captures these subtleties, and thereby allows us to analyse (often unexpected) behaviours of real-world protocols that were previously out of reach of symbolic analysis. We implement our models in the Tamarin Prover, yielding the first way to perform these analyses automatically, and validate them on several case studies. In the process, we find new attacks on DRKey and SOAP’s WS-Security, both protocols which were previously proven secure in traditional symbolic models.