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Born and raised in Nova Scotia, George attended Dalhousie University to complete both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Following his graduation, he headed West and taught undergraduate math at Victoria College and the University of British Columbia where he completed his doctorate in 1958.

The Canadian team competing at the 2020 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) earned two gold medals and two silver medals, putting them all in the top 25 per cent of all competitors.

“I was never the type to plan out my career,” says Alfred Menezes, a professor in the Department of Combinatorics & Optimization (C&O) at the University of Waterloo.

Extracted from University of Waterloo's story on September 21, 2020

When investors logged in to Y Combinator’s virtual summer 2020 Demo Day, they got to see Waterloo entrepreneurship in action. Four companies with ties to Velocity and the University of Waterloo took part in the event, including one co-founded by a recent Math alumnus, which brought together a class of 198 of founders from 26 different countries.

The 2019/2020 recipients of the Faculty of Mathematics Award for Distinction in Teaching are Jordan Hamilton and Kathryn Hare.

The award recognizes the teachers’ consistent demonstration of outstanding pedagogical skills and a deep commitment to their students’ education.

The faculty presents a maximum of two Faculty of Mathematics Award for Distinction in Teaching annually. Outstanding teachers at all levels, from first-year through to graduate studies, are eligible with recipients receiving a public citation along with a cash prize.

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.

Over 20 educators from the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Mathematics came together to develop a new course designed to help secondary school students whose education was interrupted abruptly by COVID-19.

The new online, skills-based course, MTHEL 199, gives Waterloo’s incoming students extra practice in six branches of mathematics: inequalities and absolute values, radicals and rational expressions, trigonometry, exponential and logarithmic functions, polynomials, and introductory calculus. 

Remembering Scott Vanstone and tracing his connections, influence and career

In 1972, Scott Vanstone (BMath '70, MMath '71, PhD '74) walked into Ron Mullin’s (MA '60, PhD '64) office and told him he wanted to be his student. Originally, Scott started studying chemistry at the University of Waterloo, but switched to math.