Wednesday, June 17, 2026

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• Math convocation ceremonies today
• You’re invited to a special guest lecture by Roger Martin
• Professor Steven Bednarski elected as Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London
• Gautam Kamath and collaborators awarded 2026 Gödel Prize

Math convocation ceremonies today

The Faculty of Math will celebrate convocation today with three ceremonies. 

Grads by the numbers: 1,238 undergraduates, 177 Master’s students, and 54 PhD candidates. 

Distinguished awards for the Faculty of Math 

• Governor General's Gold Medal award: Sina Kalantarzadeh and Nikhita Vinod Joshi  

• Governor General's Academic Silver Medal award: Greyson Duane Gould  

• Alumni Gold Medal: Arthur Lee Bright  

• Honorary doctorates will be awarded to Gilles Brassard and Peter E. Caines 

Distinguished Professor Emeritus - Dr. Cameron L. Stewart  

Dr. Cameron Stewart is a world-renowned number theorist who has contributed fundamental answers to deep questions across the field. He earned a B S c from the University of British Columbia in 19 71, and from there went on  to do an M S c at McGill University in 19 72 and a P h D under the direction of Fields medalist Alan Baker at the University of Cambridge in 19 76.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, an inaugural Fellow of the Canadian Mathematical Society, a University Professor and a former Canada Research Chair holder and Killam Fellow. 

Morning ceremony 

The first ceremony will be held at 10:00 a.m. in the PAC. Watch the livestream.  

The Valedictorian is Ruoqi Yang, and the mace bearer is Diana Skyzrdlo. The national anthem will be sung by Julie-Anne Desrochers.  

Afternoon ceremony 

The second ceremony will be held at 2:30 p.m. in the PAC. Watch the livestream. 

The Valedictorian is Sat Arora, and the mace bearer is Stephen Watt. The national anthem will be sung by Julie-Anne Desrochers. 

Evening ceremony 

The last ceremony will be held at 6:30 p.m. in the PAC. Watch the livestream. 

The Valedictorian is Kaitlyn Bowles, and the mace bearer is Anita Layton. The national anthem will be sung by Ricardo Fukasawa. 

You’re invited to a special guest lecture by Roger Martin  

The Faculty of Engineering invites you to join us for The Overreach of Science in the Modern World with Roger Martin on Friday, June 19 at 1:30 p.m. in the Pearl Sullivan Engineering building (formerly E7), 2nd Floor Event Space. 

Roger Martin has spent his career challenging how leaders think. As former Dean of the Rotman School of Management and one of the world's most influential management thinkers, his ideas have shaped business education and executive decision-making around the globe. 

In this provocative talk, Martin examines a question with profound implications for universities and society: Has science gone beyond its proper domain? 

Drawing on Aristotle's original conception of science, he argues that applying scientific methods too broadly comes at a cost, in particular in education and how we train leaders. 

We hope you will join us for this timely and thought-provoking conversation on the future of higher education. 

Everyone is welcome to attend - please register. 

Professor Steven Bednarski elected as Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London 

A message from St. Jerome’s University. 

Professor Bednarski (left) and Dr. Steven Sherlock (Archeologist supporting the SSHRC funded Environments of Change project who is also a Fellow).

A message from St. Jerome's University.

Professor Steven Bednarski (History/Medieval Studies) has been elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. Election as a Fellow follows a rigorous peer-nomination process to identify those who have made significant contributions to the understanding of the past. The Society of Antiquaries of London was founded in 1707 and has roots extending back to 1586. It received its royal charter in 1725 and since 1875 has been based at Burlington House, Piccadilly, alongside the Royal Academy of Arts and five other learned societies.  

This recognition highlights the impact of Professor Bednarski's scholarship, and his election further enhances the University's international reputation in historical and medieval studies. Fellowship confers the right to use the honorific post-nominal letters FSA. 

Gautam Kamath and collaborators awarded 2026 Gödel Prize

This article was originally published on the Cheriton School of Computer Science website. 

Professor Gautam Kamath and his colleagues, Ilias Diakonikolas, Daniel Kane, Jerry Li, Ankur Moitra and Alistair Stewart, have been awarded the 2026 Gödel Prize for their landmark paper, Robust Estimators in High-Dimensions without the Computational Intractability.

The Gödel Prize recognizes outstanding contributions to theoretical computer science and is widely regarded as the field’s most prestigious honour. Awarded annually since 1993, the prize is named for Kurt Gödel in recognition of his major contributions to mathematical logic and his interest in what became known as the famous P versus NP question. The award includes a cash prize of $5,000 USD.

“This is a truly wonderful and well-deserved recognition,” said Raouf Boutaba, University Professor and Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science. “It’s gratifying to see Gautam and his collaborators recognized for their pioneering work on computationally efficient algorithms for fundamental estimation tasks under constraints of robustness. Receipt of this year’s Gödel Prize, so soon after Gautam’s 2026 Presburger Award, is further evidence of the significant and lasting impact of this research.”

Foundational research on robust estimation

Robust Estimators in High Dimensions Without the Computational Intractability is a landmark paper in theoretical computer science. It resolved a foundational problem that had remained elusive for decades: whether high-dimensional robust unsupervised learning can be carried out efficiently without suffering dimension-dependent degradation in accuracy.

Before this work, understanding of the computational landscape in robust learning was limited. Even for the most basic problem of mean estimation, known statistically robust estimators were computationally intractable in high dimensions, while all known computationally efficient methods incurred error guarantees that deteriorated polynomially with the dimension.

Robust Estimators in High Dimensions without the Computational Intractability overcame this barrier. It provided the first efficient algorithms with dimension-independent error guarantees for several central high-dimensional distribution classes, and introduced a general methodology to detect and correct corruptions in high dimensions that became a blueprint for a large subsequent literature.

The field that grew out of this breakthrough is now supported by a substantial expository and educational infrastructure, including graduate-level surveys, book chapters, a research monograph, and courses at several institutions.

Presented originally at FOCS 2016, the 57^th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, this highly acclaimed paper was subsequently invited to several prestigious venues, among them the SIAM Journal on Computing’s Special Issue for FOCS 2016, Highlights of Algorithms 2017, and Communications of the ACM Research Highlights. As of June 2026, it has been cited more than 670 times.