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Welcome to Pure Mathematics

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

Friday, September 29, 2023

Spring 2023 Graduands

Congratulations to Clement Wan, MMath and Eric Boulter, PhD, who convocated in Spring 2023. Best of luck in your future endeavours!

Events

Tuesday, February 11, 2025 10:00 am - 10:50 am EST (GMT -05:00)

Number Theory Seminar

Roy Zhao, Tsinghua University

Unlikely Intersection Problems and The Pila-Zannier Method

The Zilber-Pink Conjecture or the Mordell-Lang Conjecture predict that the unlikely intersections, be it for dimension reasons or other geometrical reasons, between a variety and families of special subvarieties can be completely explained by only finitely many special subvarieties. In the past twenty years, Pila and Zannier introduced a new method to prove these types of problems by utilizing tools from o-minimality and functional transcendence. In this talk, we will give an overview of this method in some simple cases of the Andre-Oort Conjecture. Then, we will discuss our recent work and how it plays a key role in the Pila-Zannier method proof of the full Andre-Oort Conjecture.

Join on Zoom

Tuesday, February 11, 2025 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm EST (GMT -05:00)

Algebraic Geometry Working Seminar

Jiahui Huang, University of Waterloo

Deformation of Complex Structures in Mirror Symmetry

In the spirit of relating the complex geometry of a Calabi-Yau manifold to the Kahler geometry of its mirror, this talk considers how their deformations relate to each other. We study deformations of complex structures via Kodaira-Spencer theory and Kahler structures via Gromov-Witten invariants. We will also look at how they relate to homological mirror symmetry.

MC 5479

Wednesday, February 12, 2025 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm EST (GMT -05:00)

Student Number Theory Seminar

Adam Jelinsky, University of Waterloo

The Completing Technique for sums of periodic complex valued functions

In Iwaniec and Kowalski's book on analytic number theory, they detail what they call the "completing technique" to evaluate bounds on incomplete sums of periodic functions Z^n->C by "completing" it by finding an equivalent complete sum over all Z/qZ. In this talk we will discuss how this completion technique can be used to prove the Polya-Vinogradov inequality, which gives a nearly tight bound on all sums of Dirichlet characters over the interval [N,N+M]. From this we will discuss other applications of this method, and give examples where this method fails to give a bound that is nontrivial.

MC 5403