Dean's Message - February 2017

Thanks to everyone who came out to celebrate the launch of our Faculty of Mathematics 50^th anniversary last month. You can find event photos, a recording of the first decade panel and the Governor General’s greeting online. His congratulatory message concludes with “I thank all of you who are working day in and day out to advance our understanding and application of mathematics.”

Also in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Faculty of Mathematics, at the beginning of each month of 2017 a set of five problems from the 54 years of CEMC contests will be posted. Solutions to the problems will be posted at the beginning of the next month.

Faculty members, staff and donors came out to celebrate the 30^th annual awards ceremony and dinner in January to award more than $1.8M in scholarships to outstanding students, celebrate our Alumni Achievement Award Winners Glenn Ives (BMath ’84), David McKay (BMath ’87), Joanna Duong Chang (BMath ’04) and William Zhou (BMath ’15), and of course, to enjoy MC Serge D’Alessio’s legendary math jokes.

Last Friday, Computer Science held a fun and lively birthday party. There was fantastic energy in the room, and it was great to see so many faculty, staff and students all celebrating the 50^th anniversary of computer science as a unit.

At the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Atlanta, we announced a new partnership with Maplesoft to combine the company’s online courseware platform, Möbius, with Waterloo-developed content. Möbius uses technology that keeps students actively engaged through interactive applications, visualizations and immediate feedback. This is an exciting step forward in STEM education.

Congratulations to these colleagues for recent recognition of their achievements:

Richard Cook, winner of a University of Waterloo Award of Excellence in Graduate Supervision
Michael Godfrey and Urs Hengartner, named ACM Senior Members
Stefan Steiner, recipient of the Brumbaugh Award from the American Society for Quality.

At this time of year, recruiting is in full swing. All units in Math are hiring and we have many excellent candidates coming through, making for a busy but exciting time. This week alone we have 34 seminars posted on the Math Faculty WebNotice. Beyond these, we have opportunities this month to enjoy a number of special events: