Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Studies

Mathieu Guay-Paquet was awarded an Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Studies honour at the spring 2013 convocation.

Mathieu's PhD thesis entitled "Algebraic Methods and Monotone Hurwitz Numbers" introduced monotone Hurwitz numbers and proved many deep results about these mathematical objects and their generating series. Monotone Hurwitz numbers count factorizations of a given permuatation into a fixed number of transpositions subject to some transitivity and monotonicity conditions. These numbers arise in the theory of random matrices which have applications in mathematical physics.

Mathieu's thesis was written under the supervision of Professor Ian Goulden. The external examiner for his thesis defense was Fields medallist Andrei Okounkov.