News

University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Mathematics fourth-year student, Kyne Santos, will be a contestant on Canada’s Drag Race.

The reality television competition series, which premieres tonight, Thursday, July 2, is based on the American series RuPaul’s Drag Race and tests the contestants on acting, dancing, branding, improv, performance, sewing and everything a drag queen does in their career.

In addition to a new dean in the Faculty of Mathematics starting on July 1, we welcomed two new unit heads. Jochen Koenemann returns as chair of the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization and Raouf Boutaba becomes the eighth director of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science.

Researchers have found that people sometimes tend to rely on easily manipulated factors when evaluating whether to trust a social media account named after a crisis event.

A new study, led by University of Waterloo researcher Apoorva Chauhan, found that in evaluating the trustworthiness of social media accounts named after crisis events, people sometimes pay attention to the page’s profile picture, name, the number of followers it has, and spelling and grammatical errors.

Cheriton School of Computer Science PhD students Brad Glasbergen and Michael Abebe, along with Professors Khuzaima Daudjee, Daniel Vogel and Jian Zhao, have received the Best Demonstration Award at the 2020 ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) Conference.

Congratulations to the 17 researchers in the Faculty of Mathematics who have been awarded a 2019 Outstanding Performance Award announced by Vice-President, Academic and Provost Jim Rush.

Applied Mathematics

• David Harmsworth
• Sivabal Sivaloganathan

Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computing

• Carrie Knoll

Combinatorics and Optimization

This year’s Convocation was one no one expected. The Class of 2020 graduated without an in-person ceremony, but not without celebration. The University handed out lawn signs for local graduating students, staff and faculty members, we designed downloadable signs in multiple languages for our diverse students and gifs for social media, and the entire University community shared congratulations messages.

Recent graduates, Jun Yan (Pure Mathematics and Combinatorics & Optimization) and Jameson Weng (Computer Science) have been awarded the Alumni Gold Medal and Governor General’s Silver Medal, respectively. 

The prestigious medals were awarded to the undergraduate students after they attained the highest academic standing during their degrees.

With some basic English, Andres Garcia Rodriguez left his family and home in Mexico to finish high school. He arrived first in Vancouver, attended a camp to improve his English. After he learned that there was a spot at a high school in Toronto, Rodriguez moved across the country.

Kerthanan Srikantharajah has always gone above and beyond. Whatever he could do to improve where he studied or where he worked – he would do it. That included doing as much as he could in one degree. Srikantharajah leaves Waterloo with a BMath, Honours in Actuarial Science with a Finance option, Joint Honours in Statistics and a minor in Computer Science.

To graduate in time, it meant he sometimes had to overload his courses. He added a sixth course some terms and took one or two classes during co-op terms.

Lily Wang always wanted to be an academic. When she was younger, she was involved in several math outreach events. This involvement introduced Lily to the University of Waterloo through the contests offered by the Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computer Science (CEMC).