Congratulations to Ondřej Lhotak and Laurent Marcoux, recipients of the Faculty of Mathematics 2024 Awards for Distinction in Teaching. The award, which was established in 2007, comes with a cash prize and recognizes teachers in the Faculty “who have consistently demonstrated outstanding pedagogical skills and a deep commitment to our students’ education.”
Ondřej Lhotak
Ondřej Lhotak is a professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science. He has been teaching at the University of Waterloo since 2006, and does research on programming languages and compilers.
“Many of Prof. Lhotak’s past students stated that his passion and teaching prepared them for their career endeavours and sparked an interest in pursuing graduate research in compiler studies and programming,” says Raouf Boutaba, director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science. “His influence on his students’ academic and career journey is a testament to his teaching ability.”
“I am thankful to all the great instructors I had during my undergraduate studies at Waterloo, some of whom won this award before me,” Lhotak says. “When people train to become professors they are generally taught a lot about research but not much about teaching, so most of what I know about teaching comes from trying to copy the strategies of the great teachers I had.”
Lhotak is also grateful to the past and present instructors in the Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computing (CEMC), who helped spark his interest in mathematics decades ago. “At one time, I was just an ordinary kid in an ordinary high school without much of an idea of what I wanted to do in life, and those contests opened a window for me toa world of math and computer science way more interesting and fun than anything one encounters in the normal high school curriculum, as well as to a community of people with common interests.”
This fall, Lhotak is preparing to teaching CS 241E, colloquially referred to as “baby Compilers,” which prepares computer science and software engineering students to write compilers. While this class is particularly close to his own research classes, he notes that Waterloo students are rewarding to teach across the board. “Waterloo attracts the bulk of the very best computer science students in Canada as well as many excellent international students,” he says. “The talents of the students are inspiring and I love to see them succeed.”
Lhotak advises his fellow instructors to challenge their students, and then help them rise to the challenge. “I like to give students an amibitous, challenging goal that seems out of reach, then give them enough stepping stones to make each step attainable,” he says. “Students feel that they’ve achieved something big and significant as theey progress towards the goal. They also appreciate my role as an ally in helping them make progress; it’s the goal that’s the adversary, not me.”
Laurent Marcoux
Laurent Marcoux is a professor of Pure Mathematics. He completed his M.Math and PhD at Waterloo, and has taught here since 2001. His research has focused on multiple fields, but he is currently particularly interested in the structure of sets of continuous linear transformations acting on a Hilbert space.
Marcoux teaches a variety of lower- and upper-division courses, including first year-calculus, Introduction to Lebesgue measure and Fourier Analysis, and the graduate-level Introduction to Banach and Operator Algebras.
“Waterloo is fortunate enough to have a great many students who are not only extremely talented but also supremely motivated to learn,” Marcoux says. “I am grateful to the many undergraduate and graduate students who have worked with me over the years, and hope that they have found the experience as rewarding as I have.”
“Prof. Marcoux’s nominators describe him as an inspiring educator who encouraged many students to pursue Undergraduate Student Research Awards and future students in pure mathematics, as well as a caring and dedicated instructor who went the extra mile to help students learn,” says Diana Skrzydlo, the Math Faculty Teaching Fellow.
“Take your mathematics seriously,” Marcoux says when asked for his advice for his fellow teachers, “but take yourself much less seriously.”
You can learn more about the Awards for Distinction in Teaching, and see a list of past winners, on the Math website.
