News

We are sad to share the news that Peter Ponzo passed away peacefully on July 5, 2020 after a battle with bone cancer.

Peter became an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo in 1964. Peter was known for his ability to make calculus so simple and logical. “His lectures were something to behold,” said Ron Dunkley, once Associate Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics. “He was a fabulous teacher with a beautiful way of expressing calculus.”

Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science professor Marius Hofert and David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science professors Sergey Gorbonuv, Gautum Kamath and Jian Zhao have each been awarded a Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Accelerator Supplement (DAS).

John Cabeen Beatty III (November 27, 1947 – July 2, 2020)

John Cabeen Beatty III passed away peacefully in his sleep in the early morning of July 2, 2020 at his home on Gabriola Island, British Columbia. He was born in New York City on November 27, 1947. His father was a lawyer and later a member of the Oregon State Legislature and a judge. His mother was a founding research scientist at the Oregon Primate Research Center whose public service included membership on the Oregon Energy Facility Siting Council under three consecutive governors.

Two faculty members have been awarded the 2020 Faculty of Mathematics Golden Jubilee Research Excellence Award. Pengfei Li and William Slofstra are each awarded $2,500.

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.