Matthew Harrison-Trainor (BMath 2012) has won the first Faculty of Mathematics' Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research. He will receive the award at the morning convocation on June 15, 2012.
Matthew was an Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) undergraduate student research assistant to Professor Rahim Moosa during the summers of 2010 and 2011. In 2010 Matthew was the lead researcher (with Professor Moosa and Jack Klys, another undergraduate student researcher) in a project that made significant contributions to a major open problem in differential algebra. Their resulting paper was recently accepted by the top international journal in algebra.
In 2011 Matthew worked on a project at the cutting edge of current research in differential-algebraic geometry and model theory (a subfield of mathematical logic), in which he made substantial progress and obtained results which he and Professor Moosa intend to submit for publication.
This summer he is working as a research assistant to Professor Barbara Csima in the area of computable model theory.
Matthew will receive his BMath, Honours Pure Mathematics, in June. In September he heads to the University of California, Berkeley for graduate work in logic.
More information can be found on the Math Faculty website.
Congratulations, Matthew!