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
Two Pure Math professors win Outstanding Performance Awards
The awards are given each year to faculty members across the University of Waterloo who demonstrate excellence in teaching and research.
Pure Math PhD student wins Amit and Meena Chakma Award for Exceptional Teaching
The award ($1000), which is given to up to four recipients annually, recognizes excellence in teaching by students, including intellectual vigour, skill in communication and presentation of subject matter, and concern for the needs of students.
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
Differential Geometry Working Seminar
Jacques Van Wyk, University of Waterloo
“The” Generalised Levi-Civita Connection
I will discuss the notions of generalised metrics and generalised connections in generalised geometry. A generalised connection has an associated torsion tensor, so one may ask, if given a generalised metric G, whether there is a torsion-free connection D compatible with G; this is the analogue of the Levi-Civita connection. We will see that there are infinitely many such connections D, that is, there is no unique “generalised Levi-Civita connection,” a striking difference from the situation for Riemannian geometry.
MC 5479
Analysis Seminar
Adina Goldberg, University of Waterloo
Synchronous Quantum Games
We recast nonlocal games using string diagrams, allowing for a natural extension to quantum games (with bipartite question and answer states). We define strategies in this setting and show that synchronous quantum games require synchronized players to win. We give examples of some quantum games on quantum graphs and see that these require quantum homo/isomorphisms to win. (The talk is based on a preprint ``Quantum games and synchronicity'' (https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.15444). This work is inspired by Musto, Reutter, and Verdon's paper ``A compositional approach to quantum functions'', and relies heavily on the reference ``Categories for Quantum Theory'' by Heunen and Vicary for string diagrams in quantum information.)
MC 5417
Geometry and Topology Seminar
Jesse Huang, University of Waterloo
Birational coherent constructible correspondence
A major progress towards the Homological Mirror Symmetry (HMS) conjecture of Kontsevich is a version of HMS for toric varieties proved by Fang-Liu-Treumann-Zaslow and Kuwagaki using constructible sheaves, following an approach originally introduced by Bondal. These results suggest that Bondal's approach can be reinvested as a powerful tool to investigate fundamental algebraic questions pertaining to the birational geometry of toric varieties, and have inspired recent works of Hanlon-Hicks-Lazarev and my works with Favero, both used Bondal's map to obtain short resolutions of the diagonal by a specific collection of line bundles. In this talk, I will discuss these results and their connections to noncommutative resolutions of toric singularities and the broader goal to establish birational toric HMS.
MC 5417