As a master’s student, Chris Salahub completed a project focused on reducing the risk for cyclists on the busy streets of Zurich. His passion for leveraging data to solve real-world problems is what drew him back to the Faculty of Mathematics, where he previously earned a bachelor’s degree, to pursue a PhD in statistics.
“I like to think I’m a curious person,” said Jennifer Haid (BMath’04), a native of the Waterloo Region. When she learned about Waterloo’s Math Day from her high school math teacher, she decided to attend in hopes of learning about a career path that would leverage her aptitude for mathematics in the business world. “I remember watching a professor deliver a presentation about actuarial science and thinking two things: It was challenging, and I could do it,” she shared.
Katia Naccarato has never shied away from exploring an unfamiliar path, hitting a dead end, and trying a different one. Before she enrolled in the Master of Actuarial Science (MActSc) program at the Faculty of Mathematics, she was laser-focused on pursuing a career in medicine. Her current trajectory looks nothing like she expected, but she’s confident she’s heading in the right direction.
Samantha Wallis’s enthusiasm for statistics is matched only by her longtime passion for visual arts. As she considers her path forward after graduating with a degree in mathematics, Wallis thinks about how to meld her two interests into a single career. While she hasn’t landed on a definitive answer, she has a strong hunch where she will go next.
Eli Margolis learned to appreciate math at a young age. “There was always a right and wrong answer, always a correct way of figuring something out if you searched hard enough,” she reflected.
Longevity risk is an essential concept for life insurance companies and reinsurance companies. A deep understanding of the risk is crucial, as an underestimation of longevity can seriously affect the financial healthiness of pension plans and annuity funds.
Associate Professor Marius Hofert was awarded a Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Accelerator Supplement for his suggested new work on copula modeling with generative neural networks.
While a high school student in Toronto, Maysum Panju knew that the University of Waterloo was the destination for math. While working on his undergraduate degree and Master’s in computational math, he started learning about machine learning. That led to his interests in developing algorithms and theoretical proofs and he decided to start his PhD in statistics.
A statistics professor used his expertise in calculating probabilities to come up with a 98 winning percentage for Tim Hortons popular Roll up the Rim contest.
University of Waterloo Faculty to Mathematics researchers have developed a new method that enables large insurers to reduce the time spent estimating the financial liabilities of their portfolios from days to hours while achieving high accuracy.
A study details the new method which significantly reduces computational time, but still estimates the financial liability of variable annuity portfolios accurately for business purposes.