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Tony was part of the inaugural Financial Analysis and Risk Management (FARM) cohort at the University of Waterloo, but early academic setbacks forced him to reconsider how he approached learning. He embraced campus support resources, gained his footing and began to excel. Today, he is a full-time real estate agent in New York City at the Corcoran Group, where he also works in property development, house flipping and short-term rentals.  

Before he encountered stochastic processes in a classroom, Jeffrey Gu (MDSAI ’24) was investigating probability through video games. He would calculate the chances behind loot drops and rare item rewards. Years later, as a Waterloo Statistics student, he enrolled in STAT 333, “Stochastic Processes,” with Professor Steve Drekic, turning those early intuitions into a more sophisticated understanding. The concepts he mastered in that class culminated in the creation of a new gaming project: Blackjack Oracle, a free online tool that helps players make optimal decisions at the blackjack table.

“Silicon Valley loves to romanticize the 21-year-old college dropout founder,” says Jess Zhang (BMath), founder of Blockus. But she wants students to know this isn’t the only path to entrepreneurship—in fact, it may not even be the best one.

Before launching her own company, Zhang spent seven years working in the tech industry, an experience that proved essential to her path as a founder. It not only built her skills and knowledge, but also exposed her to real-world industry challenges, including the problem that would define her career. 

During her time at Roblox, Zhang witnessed the rise of online gaming ecosystems and was struck by the incredible creativity they unleashed. She remembers one user painstakingly recreating their entire high school campus in Roblox during the pandemic. Yet she was bothered by a fundamental flaw: creators had limited ownership and control over what they built on the platform. 

The emergence of blockchain and Web3 offered a solution. Realizing that true digital ownership was possible, Zhang founded Blockus, an all-in-one ecosystem that empowers game developers to integrate Web3 features and give players full control over their digital assets. The company has already raised $4 million in pre-seed funding and continues to scale. Ultimately, she hopes Blockus can be part of a larger movement, one that leverages blockchain and web3 technologies to build greater social connectedness.

We had the chance to talk to Zhang recently and asked her about her time at Waterloo, her commitment to helping women+ in STEM fields and her journey to Blockus.

When Math alumni Adarsh Mehta (BMath ’98) and Jeff Jenner (BMath ’84) moved to a new property in the spring of 2025, they treated the parched lawn surrounding their home as a blank canvas. In its place, they envisioned an ambitious ecological project: not simply a garden, but a thriving ecosystem teeming with plants that would support wildlife, feed their family and bloom beautifully through the seasons.

Two Waterloo Region high school student teams are celebrating landmark achievements in the 2026 Technovation Girls competition. For the first time in the Waterloo chapter’s history, a team has advanced to the Technovation Girls World Summit, while another team has been recognized as the second-ranked intermediate-level team in North America.

A busy fall schedule of events has given our community plenty of opportunities to discuss the changes we're seeing in mathematics and across society as a result of AI. 

From sustainable food forests to board games, here is a look at what our alumni and supporters are building next.

Bringing back a feature from the old Math Ties with the return of A "Different Angle" that will give alumni a chance to solve math problems.

How Waterloo and the New Oxford English Dictionary Project helped create the modern search engine

Sara Kannan (BA ’16) talks about why she established the Dr. P. L. Kannappan Memorial Scholarship