Dean's Message - April 2014

Congratulations to a number of people for notable accomplishments:

Combinatorics & Optimization (C&O) faculty member Levent Tunçel, winner of the University of Waterloo Distinguished Teacher Award, to be presented at the upcoming June convocation.
Pure Mathematics doctoral student Omar Léon Sánchez, winner of the inaugural Murray Martin Prize for the Best Research Paper by a Mathematics Graduate Student. Omar graduated in 2013, and his paper, “Relative D-Groups and Differential Galois Theory in Several Derivations” was nominated by his supervisor, Rahim Moosa.
Pure Mathematics graduate student Stanley Xiao, who represented the Faculty of Mathematics in the University-wide Three-Minute Thesis competition with his presentation “Journey to Understanding the Primes”.
Mathematical Physics undergraduate student Melanie Chanona, Co-op Student of the Year for the Faculty of Mathematics.

Applications, offers of admission and acceptances of those offers continue to be strong for our graduate and undergraduate programs. We look forward to welcoming another group of exceptional students to our Faculty in September.

Colleagues in the Department of Statistics & Actuarial Science organized a wonderful memorial tribute to Founding Dean David Sprott last week. Speakers included Jim and Jack Kalbfleisch, both former deans of Mathematics. The event included the announcement of the launch of the David Sprott Distinguished Lecture Series, in recognition of Professor Sprott's contributions to the Department and Faculty, and his exceptional research accomplishments in statistics. The first lecture in this series will be held May 13 and will be given by former Mathematics faculty undergraduate Art Owen, who is now Professor of Statistics at Stanford University.

Thanks to Mathematics Society (MathSoc) for organizing a fantastic Pi Day celebration on March 14. Hundreds of students, alumni, faculty and staff were in on the fun.

Orchestra@uwaterloo presents a free concert on April 3 - “From the New World” - in the Humanities Theatre. Anna Lubiw reports that this term’s orchestra has 24 players from the Faculty of Mathematics: 20 undergraduates, 1 graduate student, 2 alumni, and 1 faculty member; including section leaders Jaysen Le (viola), Young Ho Yoo (cello) and Nicholas Lai (timpani).

$Ian Goulden$