We are home to 30 faculty, four staff, approximately 60 graduate students, several research visitors, and numerous undergraduate students. We offer exciting and challenging programs leading to BMath, MMath and PhD degrees. We nurture a very active research environment and are intensely devoted to both ground-breaking research and excellent teaching.
News
Pure Mathematics professor honoured with Distinguished Teacher Award
Pure Math Professor Yu-Ru Liu has been honoured with the University of Waterloo’s Distinguished Teacher Award, 2026.
Join us in congratulating Professor Liu and read more here!
Pure Math Department celebrates outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Student and Teaching Assistants at awards ceremony
On November 3, the department of Pure Mathematics held its Graduate Teaching and Teaching Assistant Awards Ceremony, an event that celebrates the accomplishments of its remarkable graduate students
53rd annual COSY conference a success
More than 100 researchers and students from across Canada and around the world attended the 53rd annual Canadian Operator Algebras Symposium (COSY), which took place from May 26-30 at the University of Waterloo.
Events
Special Number Theory Seminar | Quang-Khai Nguyen | Generating Series in Algebraic Dynamics
Quang-Khai Nguyen, Universite de Lyon
Generating Series in Algebraic Dynamics
In this talk, we will discuss the generating series associated with a self-map of a projective variety. This series is important in understanding the dynamical degree and plays an important role in the recent construction of the transcendental dynamical degree by Bell, Diller, and Jonsson. This talk will focus on some analytic and algebraic properties of such a series. It turns out that in some cases, rationality is rather the exception.
MC 5403
Algebraic Geometry Working Seminar | Jack Jia | Categories of representations of groups are well-behaved
Jack Jia, University of Waterloo
Categories of representations of groups are well-behaved
They are abelian (behave like module categories), symmetric monoidal (have tensor products), every object has a dual and is semi-simple, to name a few. A natural question to ask is whether every category that exhibits similar behaviour is a representation category. Deligne proved a remarkable theorem that shows every symmetric tensor category with some imposed growth condition is in fact a category of representations. Moreover, he constructed some symmetric tensor categories with faster-than-exponential growth-these are so-called Deligne categories, which can be interpreted as complex rank analogs of classical representation categories. In this talk, I will introduce the notion of symmetric tensor categories, state Deligne’s Theorem, and construct some of the Deligne categories.
MC 5403
Computability Learning Seminar | Beining Mu | Degree of categoricity and treeable degrees
Beining Mu, University of Waterloo
Degree of categoricity and treeable degrees
In this seminar, we will discuss treeable degrees and degree of categoricity. We will introduce past results on which degrees can or cannot be a degree of categoricity and when degrees of categoricity coincide with treeable degrees. We will also introduce a notion of \(\Pi^0_1\) singletons as an example of treeable degrees and their relation to degree of categoricity.
MC 5403