In its second year, the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, will hold three lectures a year to continue to honour William Tutte. In the inaugural year of the series we hosted several speakers each week between May and August.Ìý
Below, find a list of the speakers as the information becomes available. All the lectures are free, open to the public and no registration is required.
If you're not able to make the lecture, we will post a recording on the department's .
For more information about the series, contact the department at combopt@uwaterloo.ca
August 2, 2024
³§±è±ð²¹°ì±ð°ù:ÌýRyan O'Donnell
´¡´Ú´Ú¾±±ô¾±²¹³Ù¾±´Ç²Ô:ÌýCarnegie Mellon University
Area of Expertise: Computational learning theory, hardness of approximation, property testing, quantum computation, and quantum information
Lecture Title:ÌýQuartic quantum speedups for planted inference
May 17, 2024
³§±è±ð²¹°ì±ð°ù:ÌýKatya Scheinberg
´¡´Ú´Ú¾±±ô¾±²¹³Ù¾±´Ç²Ô:ÌýCornell University
Area of Expertise: Theoretical analysis of practical algorithms in continuous optimization
Lecture Title:ÌýStochastic Oracles and Where to Find Them
March 8, 2024
Speaker: Tal Rabin
Affiliation: University of Pennsylvania
Area of expertise: Secure multiparty computation, threshold cryptography, and proactive security.
Lecture title: Information Theoretic MPC: Techniques That Age Well
November 10, 2023
Speaker:ÌýDavid B. Shmoys
Affiliation: Cornell University
Area of expertise: Optimization and Data-driven Decision-making
Lecture title:ÌýAlgorithmic Tools for Congressional Districting: Fairness via Analytics
July 07, 2023
Speaker:ÌýJacob Fox
Affiliation: Stanford University
Area of expertise: Combinatorics and related areas of mathematics and computer science.
Lecture title:ÌýRamsey Cayley graphs, random graph models, and information theory
May 19, 2023
Speaker:ÌýPetter Brändén
Affiliation: KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Area of expertise: Algebraic combinatorics and the geometry of polynomials.
Lecture title:ÌýLorentzian polynomials
June 5, 2020
Speaker:ÌýLauren K. Williams
Affiliation: Harvard Unversity & the Radcliffe University
Area of expertise: Algebraic combinatorics,Ìýspecifically usingÌýalgebraic tools to study discrete structures in mathematics.
Lecture title:ÌýMatroids, tropical geometry, and positivity
September 27, 2019
Speaker: Carsten Thomassen
Affiliation: Technical University of Denmark
Area of expertise: Discrete mathematics, specifically graph theory.
Lecture title: Countable Weighted Graphs with No Unfriendly Partitions
July 19, 2019
Speaker:ÌýMario Szegedy
Affiliation: Alibaba Quantum Laboratory
Area of expertise: Combinatorics, complexity theory, quantum computing, combinatorial optimization, data streaming and black box complexity.
Lecture title: QAOA Versus Classical
March 29, 2019
Speaker:ÌýBojan MoharÌý
Affiliation: Simon Fraser University
Area of expertise:ÌýTopological graph theory, graph minors, graph coloring, algebraic graph theory, graph algorithms.
Lecture title: Toward a Theory of Crossing-Critical Graphs
November 2, 2018
Speaker: Sergey Norin
Affiliation: McGill University
Area of expertise: Graph theory and combinatorics with a concentration on extremal and structural graph theory and graph limits.
Lecture title: Razborov's flag algebras: Ten years on
August 3, 2018
Speaker: Federico Ardila
Affiliation: San Francisco State University
Area of expertise: Underlying combinatorial structure of objects in algebra, geometry, topology, and applications
Lecture title: The geometry of matroids