“Imagine being out on a lake on a windy day and you’re getting pushed around by waves,” says Marek Stastna, an oceanographer and professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics. “What you may not realize is that in the interior of the ocean, there are waves one hundred times that size. My passion is to create mathematical models of that type of movement.”
Each year, the University of Waterloo recognizes employees by celebrating their milestones of distinguished service to the University of Waterloo community.
Staff and faculty celebrating 5 to 50 years of service were honoured across a series of virtual events to recognize their contributions and tireless work that have impacted the success of the university. Join in the celebration and view messages of congratulations on the celebration board.
During his tenure in the Department of Pure Mathematics, Dr. Brian Forrest has supervised 18 master’s students, 10 doctoral students, and 11 postdoctoral fellows who have gone on to build successful careers in academia and industry. It came as no surprise to any of them that Dr. Forrest received the 2020-21 Award of Excellence in Graduate Supervision.
The Faculty of Mathematics recognizes two graduate students for their outstanding research papers. Dan Ursu, a PhD student in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Simeon Krastnikov, a recent master student of the Cheriton School of Computer Science, have been announced as the individual winners of the 2021 Huawei Prizes for Best Research Paper by a Mathematics Graduate Student.
Keshav Chawla has long harboured a passion for computer science and finance. When he discovered a way to pursue both disciplines simultaneously through Waterloo’s Computing and Financial Management program, his choice of university was clear. “I knew how robust and built-out the program was before coming in,” he explained. “Having that combination of both disciplines was the perfect fit for me.”
The University of Waterloo finds itself amongst the top universities in Canada and around the world, according to Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) worldwide university subject rankings.
Computer Science remains Waterloo’s top-rated subject internationally, ranking 23. Mathematics ranks 35 globally, joining Computer Science in the top 100 this year along with 12 other Waterloo programs. Mathematics and Computer Science are two of three university subjects in the top 50 globally.
“I started out as a student in mathematics,” said Professor Yuying Li. “It was a huge, scary move to come to Waterloo for computer science. Thankfully, it has worked out.”
“Math and medicine are like the two solitudes,” reflected Professor Siv Sivaloganathan, chair of the Department of Applied Mathematics. “They represent two separate cultures and ways of thinking.” When the two combine into mathematical medicine, the results are nothing short of astonishing.
In 1988, Sivaloganathan was a newly minted professor at the University of Alberta.
Two years into his undergraduate degree at Sichuan University, Chao Qian regretted his decision to study business management. “I came to the realization that management skills are better learned outside of the classroom,” he said. “I wanted to learn something more solid and quantitative. That’s where my journey to Waterloo began.”
Like thousands of other business leaders across Canada, Alex Hoff (BMath ’04) reckoned with the harsh financial reality of a global pandemic at the beginning of 2020. “As a leadership team, we had to scale back and make tough hiring decisions once we realized that we couldn’t grow as quickly as anticipated,” he shared.