Tutte's Distinguished Lecture Series

In its second year, the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, will hold three lectures a year to continue to honour William Tutte. In the inaugural year of the series we hosted several speakers each week between May and August. 

Below, find a list of the speakers as the information becomes available. All the lectures are free, open to the public and no registration is required.

If you're not able to make the lecture, we will post a recording on the department's YouTube Channel.

For more information about the series, contact the department at combopt@uwaterloo.ca

March 8, 2024

Tal Rabin

Speaker: Tal Rabin

Affiliation: University of Pennsylvania

Area of expertise: Secure multiparty computation, threshold cryptography, and proactive security.

Lecture title: Information Theoretic MPC: Techniques That Age Well


November 10, 2023

Speaker: David B. Shmoys

David B. Shmoys

Affiliation: Cornell University

Area of expertise: Optimization and Data-driven Decision-making

Lecture title: Algorithmic Tools for Congressional Districting: Fairness via Analytics

July 07, 2023

Speaker: Jacob Fox

Jacob Fox

Affiliation: Stanford University

Area of expertise: Combinatorics and related areas of mathematics and computer science.

Lecture title: Ramsey Cayley graphs, random graph models, and information theory

May 19, 2023

Speaker: Petter Brändén

Petter Brändén

Affiliation: KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Area of expertise: Algebraic combinatorics and the geometry of polynomials.

Lecture title: Lorentzian polynomials

June 5, 2020

Speaker: Lauren K. Williams

Lauren K. Williams

Affiliation: Harvard Unversity & the Radcliffe University

Area of expertise: Algebraic combinatorics, specifically using algebraic tools to study discrete structures in mathematics.

Lecture title: Matroids, tropical geometry, and positivity

September 27, 2019

Speaker: Carsten Thomassen

Carsten Thomassen

Affiliation: Technical University of Denmark

Area of expertise: Discrete mathematics, specifically graph theory.

Lecture title: Countable Weighted Graphs with No Unfriendly Partitions

July 19, 2019

Speaker: Mario Szegedy

Mario Szegedy

Affiliation: Alibaba Quantum Laboratory

Area of expertise: Combinatorics, complexity theory, quantum computing, combinatorial optimization, data streaming and black box complexity.

Lecture title: QAOA Versus Classical

March 29, 2019

Speaker: Bojan Mohar 

Bojan Mohar

Affiliation: Simon Fraser University

Area of expertise: Topological graph theory, graph minors, graph coloring, algebraic graph theory, graph algorithms.

Lecture title: Toward a Theory of Crossing-Critical Graphs

November 2, 2018

Sergey Norin

Speaker: Sergey Norin

Affiliation: McGill University

Area of expertise: Graph theory and combinatorics with a concentration on extremal and structural graph theory and graph limits.

Lecture title: Razborov's flag algebras: Ten years on

August 3, 2018

Federico Ardila

Speaker: Federico Ardila

Affiliation: San Francisco State University

Area of expertise: Underlying combinatorial structure of objects in algebra, geometry, topology, and applications

Lecture title: The geometry of matroids