A golden anniversary within a diamond – that’s what we’re celebrating this year. As the University turns 60, we celebrate 50 years of the largest concentration of mathematical and computer science talent in the world.
We’ve enjoyed incredible—and incredibly well attended—events celebrating the golden jubilee this year. We started with the First Decades Panel and continued with other events throughout the year that you can see on our 50th Anniversary website. Thank you to all who have joined us in our celebrations.
As we approached this important milestone, we reflected on what has made the Faculty what it is, a leader in Canada and globally in mathematics, computing, and statistics. What has brought us to this point? Unquestionably, it is our people.
The critical mass of mathematical and computer science talent has allowed us to prepare generations of talented graduates upon whose skills the world relies. The creativity of our researcher provides insights and solutions for some of the most interesting and pressing problems of our time.
Our recent achievements continue to drive us forward: new data science undergraduate and graduate programs, a new data systems lab, and the announcement of two leading-edge institutes in Cybersecurity and Privacy and Artificial Intelligence. It is little wonder that the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science was recently ranked 15th globally by U.S. News and World Report while mathematics maintains its well-deserved reputation in the QS rankings.
We continue to attract top students to further our success. The Waterloo ACM team were this year’s North American Champions at the International Collegiate Programing Contest world finals. They also tied for 13th place out of 128 universities, coming in ahead of teams from MIT, Princeton, Berkeley, UBC, and others. Four contestants who represented Canada at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) in Tehran earned medals – and one joined the Faculty of Mathematics this fall! The Waterloo student Putnam competitors finished in 6th place out of 568 institutions, with 26 students among the top 501 individual competitors (out of 4,164 in total). The top five universities were Carnegie Mellon, Princeton, Harvard, MIT, and Stanford.
What does the next 50 years look like? We will continue to recruit the best and brightest students and faculty who will continue to make us all proud. The new first-year undergraduate students (over 1,325 of them) we welcomed into our degree programs this past September are certainly a reflection of this.
We hope that you enjoy this issue of Math e-Ties, and please do stay in touch.
With best wishes,
Stephen M. Watt
Dean, Faculty of Mathematics
P.S. If there is something you would like to see in future editions, please contact Kate Dal Castel, Senior Advancement Officer.
