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Jinjiang ‘J.J.’ Lian first realized he wanted to become a data scientist while working as a data manager for clinical research at a university healthcare facility in the US. “I noticed that many healthcare workers lacked the skill set to collect and interpret patient data correctly, which negatively impacted patient care,” he recalls. “I decided that whether I ended up in healthcare, tech, or another industry altogether, I wanted to use my data skills to help people.”

She grew up in Alberta and Nova Scotia, but she considers Nanchang, China, her second home. After earning undergraduate degrees in pure mathematics and education, Alyssa Schultz Dey took a leap of faith and accepted a teaching position at the Nanchang No. 2 High School Sino-Canadian Nova Scotia International Program in southeastern China.

Axelar, a decentralized network that connects application builders with blockchain ecosystems, applications and users, has raised $3.75 million USD in seed funding from Silicon Valley investors, including DCVC, a San Francisco–based venture capital firm specializing in deep tech, and notable blockchain companies and investors such as Binance X, Lemniscap, Collab+Currency, North Island Ventures, Divergence Ventures, Cygni Labs, and others.

Every mathematician solves math problems, but only a handful of mathematicians study the logical reasoning that they and their colleagues use to solve problems. They focus on the journey, not just the destination. 

The main difference between current wireless networks and 5G networks comes down to two words — speed and latency.

5G networks are expected to be up to 100 times faster than current networks. And at that speed, 5G drastically cuts latency when connecting to the network, the lag between instructing a computer to perform a task and its execution. One thing we know with certainty — by delivering mountains of data at warp speed wirelessly, the impact of 5G will be enormous and it will be felt across all sectors of society.

“When I was a kid, I always begged my parents to buy me those little Mind Benders puzzles,” remembered Rose McCarty. “My favorite puzzles were the ones that were so difficult that I wasn’t sure whether or not I could actually solve them. At Waterloo Math, I’m the one coming up with different puzzles to solve. I have an opportunity to tackle big, imprecise, unwieldly problems that determine what my field will look like in 20 years.”

Hayley Reid almost attended another university. “I was leaning in a different direction, but Waterloo Math blew me away on Visitation Day,” she remembers. “There was a real sense of community, which was a key factor for me.” Hayley also had the opportunity to meet Dr. David McKinnon, her future PhD supervisor who introduced her to an area of research that blends geometry with number theory. “It was my first exposure to the field, and I was sold,” she says. She committed to a master’s degree in pure mathematics and never looked back.

As a student at a high school where two of the three math teachers were alumni of the Faculty of Mathematics at Waterloo, Eli Margolis learned to love math at a young age. “I appreciated the clarity of the problem-solving aspect,” she reflected. “There was always a right and wrong answer, always a correct way of figuring something out if you searched hard enough.”

“I wasn’t necessarily entrepreneurial in my time at Waterloo, but I was always very inventive,” remembered Jeff Shiner (BMath ’92), the CEO of a growing Toronto-based startup. “All I knew was that I wanted to create new computer programs.”

As Shiner came of age with the personal computer, he taught himself programming languages. “I remember getting my first Commodore 64 when I was 12 or 13 years old,” he says. “I geeked out at everything related to the computer. When it came time to decide on a university, Waterloo Math’s computer science program was the only one on my radar.”

The faculty is now the first Faculty of Mathematics to hold Sponsoring Institutional Membership of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM). 

AWM encourages women and girls to study and to have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity and the equal treatment of women and girls in the mathematical sciences.