Wednesday, August 19, 2015

An international workshop experience for students

by Merrirose Stone.

The international team of Co-operative Education & Career Action (CECA) hosts the workshop “Considering International Work Term Opportunities for Co-op Students”. The workshop is held in partnership with the Centre for Career Action (CCA) and is designed for students who are investigating the possibility of an international work term, or for those who will be applying to jobs in international locations.  

This session includes information to help students determine their eligibility to work abroad, to unpack the financial aspects of a work term outside of North America, to explain the nuances of the co-op interview/rank/match process for some international jobs, and to identify the balance of workplace expectations within a different cultural context.

With Waterloo’s presence around the globe on the increase, we commit to providing our students with the information and tools needed to successfully navigate the end-to-end process of a work term abroad. In 2014, more than 2,300 work terms were undertaken in over 60 countries ranging from the United States to Germany to Singapore.  International work terms adhere to University, faculty and the Canadian Association of Co-operative Education (CAFCE) guidelines.

As ambassadors for the University, our students have opportunities to represent their faculty, the University, and the co-op program. Our workshop enables them to think more concretely about an international experience by asking questions such as:

• Do they like the “security” of using JobMine for employment opportunities or does the thought of “arranging their own job” excite them?
• What financial preparations do they have in place?
• Are they eligible to work abroad and do they have a valid passport?
• What skills and benefits might come from experiencing a new culture?  What might be difficult?

On the international team, we strive to develop high-calibre jobs for our students around the globe. Should a student wish to arrange their own job, our team will work to ensure safety and to maximize the benefit for both the student and the employer. Long-term benefits of international work terms come in the form of expanded career horizons and an enhanced career path.

More information on and registration for this workshop can be found on the CCA website.

For math profs, a proof 45 years in the making

This article was written by Professor Alfred Menezes and was originally published on the Combinatorics & Optimization news site.

Professor Eric Katz of the University of Waterloo and his colleagues Karim Adiprasito (Max Planck Society and Hebrew University) and June Huh (Clay Mathematical Institute and Princeton University) have proved Rota's 45-year old conjecture on the log concavity of the characteristic polynomial of matroids.

Mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota made his famous conjecture in his 1970 address to the International Congress of Mathematicians. The conjecture concerns matroids, the common combinatorial generalization of graphs and linear subspaces. There is a particular polynomial that one can associate with a matroid, called the characteristic polynomial. It is a generalization of the chromatic polynomial of a graph which counts the graph's proper colourings. It was observed that in every example, the coefficients of the characteristic polynomial had a property called log-concavity, which meant that the logarithms of the coefficients form a concave sequence. Rota conjectured that all matroids have this property. Yet, until this recent work, no one knew if every matroid has this property or a reason behind it.

The Adiprasito-Huh-Katz proof of Rota's log-concavity conjecture draws on earlier work of Huh, individually and jointly with Katz. The earlier results used powerful and deep methods from algebraic geometry which concerns algebraic varieties, the solution sets to systems of polynomial equations. The new results establish an algebraic geometric framework for matroids even though no algebraic variety is present.

June Huh and Eric Katz presented the proof of Rota's conjecture at the August 10-15 workshop on Positivity in Combinatorial Algebraic Geometryat the University of Oregon.

"It's pretty exciting to make such a big discovery in matroid theory. And it's fun that it relies on some techniques originating in a completely different branch of mathematics," Katz said. He continued, "The result is taking us some time to write up as we've all been traveling this summer. But we expect to circulate a preprint pretty soon. Maybe in six weeks. Two months, tops."

Editor's note: this is not a matroid.

Wednesday's notes

Breean Belton of Engineering snapped this pic of a hawk with a squirrel in its sights (check the bottom right corner of the image) outside the Dana Porter Library yesterday morning. There's not much else to say except that some days you're the hawk, and some days you're the squirrel.

A TriUniversity Group (TUG) upgrade to Library software will take place beginning Sunday, August 23 at 8:00 p.m. and is expected to be complete on Friday, August 28. 

Books and course reserves will continue to be signed out during this downtime, and Primo will be available for users to search our physical and electronic holdings. Access to personal accounts (My Account) and hold/recall placements will be inoperative until the upgrade is complete.

For more information, please contact Jamie Reilly, manager, circulation services: lending at j2reilly@uwaterloo.ca.