Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Jeffrey Shallit is one of five foreign members elected to the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters for 2020.
James Petrie places a high premium on intellectual freedom. After graduating with a degree in Engineering Physics from the University of British Columbia (UBC), he accepted a position as a firmware engineer for a leading multinational technology company. “A few months in, I realized I was missing the opportunity to view problems through a wider lens and pursue the things that interested me most,” he remembers.
“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.
The University of Waterloo and Rogers Communications partner on advanced research for Canadian-made 5G solutions in a real-world setting
The University of Waterloo has become one of the first 5G smart campuses in Canada as part of a partnership with Rogers Communications that leverages the University’s global leadership in computing, engineering and co-operative education.
Not long after beginning his graduate program at Waterloo, Matthew Sullivan discovered a passion for Ultimate Frisbee. Today, he serves as the chief of the Ultimate Frisbee intramural program while continuing to referee and play as often as he can. Close to 450 students sign up to play every autumn. “Things like age, gender, or program don’t matter out there,” says Matthew. “Any student can go out and play. Like all the intramural sports at Waterloo, Ultimate provides a great way to de-stress, stay in shape, and balance the academic with the social.”
The start of the Spring Term, at the height of COVID, had instructors moving their courses to a remote format with students spread across time zones. It changed delivery, assignments and testing as in the case of Anton Mosunov, an award-winning lecturer in the Faculty of Mathematics who altered the MATH 135 midterm to an oral exam.
PhD candidate Stavros Birmpilis, co-supervised by Cheriton School of Computer Science Professors George Labahn and Arne Storjohann, has won one of two Distinguished Student Author Awards at ISSAC 2020, the 45th International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation.
Motivated by prior research that reports elevator buttons as a huge source of contamination, a new study co-authored by Waterloo Faculty of Math student presents a touchless elevator concept to slow the spread of COVID-19.
Prior research shows that elevator buttons produce the highest rate of bacterial contamination (97 per cent) and can house more germs than toilet stall surfaces. However, for many people (especially health-care and front line workers), elevators are a daily necessity.