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
Algebraic and Enumerative combinatorics seminar - Tyler Dunaisky-Cosmological Correlators and Triangulating the Dual Cosmological Polytope
| Speaker: |
Tyler Dunaisky
|
| Affiliation: | Purdue University |
| Location: | MC 5417 |
Abstract: A cosmological correlator is an Euler integral, associated to a graph G, which encodes information about the state of the early universe. Evaluation of these integrals is extremely challenging, even in simple cases. However, it turns out the integrand can be identified with the so-called canonical form of the cosmological polytope, revealing a rich combinatorial structure and allowing the application of techniques from commutative algebra. I'll sketch my contribution to this story and advertise the fledgling field of positive geometry, which seeks to generalize the notion of canonical forms to geometric objects more exotic than polytopes.
There will be a pre-seminar presenting relevant background at the beginning graduate level starting at 1:30pm.
Crypto Reading Group - Maggie Simmons-Formally Verified Correctness Bounds for Lattice-Based Cryptography
Abstract: Decryption errors play a crucial role in the security of KEMs based on
Fujisaki-Okamoto because the concrete security guarantees provided by
this transformation directly depend on the probability of such an event
being bounded by a small real number. In this paper we present an
approach to formally verify the claims of statistical probabilistic
bounds for incorrect decryption in lattice-based KEM constructions. Our
main motivating example is the PKE encryption scheme underlying ML-KEM.
We formalize the statistical event that is used in the literature to
heuristically approximate ML-KEM decryption errors and confirm that the
upper bounds given in the literature for this event are correct. We
consider FrodoKEM as an additional example, to demonstrate the wider
applicability of the approach and the verification of a correctness
bound without heuristic approximations. We also discuss other
(non-approximate) approaches to bounding the probability of ML-KEM
decryption.
|