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Over 20 educators from the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Mathematics came together to develop a new course designed to help secondary school students whose education was interrupted abruptly by COVID-19.

The new online, skills-based course, MTHEL 199, gives Waterloo’s incoming students extra practice in six branches of mathematics: inequalities and absolute values, radicals and rational expressions, trigonometry, exponential and logarithmic functions, polynomials, and introductory calculus. 

“While working as an instructional support assistant (ISA), I remember the first time a professor asked for a volunteer to teach a lecture while he was at a conference,” remembers Josué Kurke. “My hand shot up. I donned a professorial kind of jacket with the elbow patches and went all out. Over time, I’ve realized that I feel most at home in front of a classroom. I want to spend my career talking to people about math.”

With most classes continuing online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Mathematics has had to adapt other aspects of campus life, such as orientation.

The Fall 2020 orientation week, which runs from September 1st to September 7th, is completely virtual.

The nearly 2,600 incoming Faculty of Mathematics students are therefore experiencing an orientation like none before. The faculty’s orientation teams have expended great effort to recreate the fun and interactive aspects that are usually experienced by incoming students.

Quantum computers will now have help tackling the central problem in their performance – noise.

Joel Wallman, a researcher at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) and assistant professor of applied mathematics at the University of Waterloo, has developed a protocol that will help deal with the issue of noise in quantum computers so that they can tackle more complex problems.