DeLury TA Award Winners Announced

We are happy to announce that this year’s winners of the Daniel B. DeLury Teaching Awards for graduate students in mathematics are:

  • Karene Chu
  • Bruce Fontaine
  • Henning Petzka

The selection committee consisted of Catherine Sulem and Abe Igelfeld.

Nominations were made by course instructors and undergraduate students.

The selection committee received many favourable comments about our TA’s as fine work is being done by many of our teaching assistants, and we can take pride in their work.

Congratulations Karene, Bruce and Henning!

Cressy Award to Math Union Co-President

This year Sergio DaSilva, co-president of the Math Union this year was one of 15 winners of a Cressy Award.

The awards are given for outstanding volunteer service to the faculty, their departments and the university and for their contributions towards enhancing student experience.

Photos of the Award winner luncheon with Dean of Arts and Science, Meric Gertler, can be found here

Congratulations to Sergio and all the other award winners!

Math and all that Jazz

Recently PhD candidate Alex Bloemendal sat down with the University of Toronto’s Bulletin to talk about how his love of music, his passion for math and an “enthralling conversation about probability” was what drew him into the Specialist Mathematics program here in the Department.

The Bulletin calls Alex “a virtuoso on the piano” who’s “favourite toy [growing up] was his mother’s Texas Instruments calculator” and talks about how there “is a common understanding among mathematicians that math is in fact the basis of sound.  Time, rhythm, meter, intervals and harmony all have a firm grounding in math.”

It then goes on to talk how, after some tough decisions, and a conversation with our own Professor Jeremy Quastel, Alex decided on doing his undergraduate degree right here at UofT.

The full article can be found on Page 8 here: http://www.news.utoronto.ca/bulletin/PDF_issues/04-19-11_web.pdf

2010 Putnam Results

We are pleased to announce the Putnam results for 2010.

Konstantin Matveev was the best Canadian contestant and among the top twenty in North America. He will receive the Nathan Mendelsohn Prize for this honour.

In addition, Alexander Remorov received an honorable mention with the score among the thirty best in North America. Keith Ng and Jonathan Zung also ranked in 101-200 range.

The University of Toronto team consisting of Alexander Remorov, Konstantin Matveev and Sida Wang ranked tenth.

The top five teams in order were Caltech, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley and University of Waterloo.

Duke, Princeton, Stanford and University of British Columbia placed among the top ten.

All told, 4296 students from 546 institutions competed; there were teams from 442 institutions.

Congratulations to all our participants!

2011 Undergraduate Mathematics Competition

The eleventh annual University of Toronto Undergraduate Mathematics Competition was written on Sunday, March 6,2011. There were twenty-six candidates writing on all three campuses.

We would like to thank Nick Cheng for organizing the Scarborough site and John Inciura for organizing the Mississauga site.

The top two papers were very close; after checking by Ed Barbeau, Felix Recio, Ilia Binder and Franklin Vera Pachebo, it was decided to award a tie for first place.

The paper and solutions can be seen at www.math.utoronto.ca/barbeau/torcontest11.pdf

A full list of previous winner can be found at: http://www.math.toronto.edu/cms/undergraduate-mathematics-contest-list-of-winners/

Rankings

Honour students in order of rank [Scores 27-58]

1. Remorov, Alexander     III AS Mathematics & Statistics
1. Ng, Keith              III AS Mathematics & Physics
3. Sagatov, Sergei        IV  AS Mathematics
4. Chen, Philip           II  Engineering Science
5. Sun, Fengwei           UTSC
6. Huo, Jungwei           II  AS Economics & Statistics
7. Hua, Mengdi            II  AS Economics

Second category in alphabetical order [Scores 10-21]

Baydina, Viktoriya        II  AS Mathematics & Physics
Dhillon, Amanjit          I   Engineering Science
Guo, Kinyan
Hu, Shufeng
Jiang, Lin
Kidwai, Omar
Park, Sang Hee
Rumsey, Susan Elizabeth

There were 11 additional candidates with scores in the range 0 to 6.

Congratulations to the candidates for their participation and solutions to the problems.

Math TA Shortlisted for Excellence Award

Congratulations go to Andrew Holm, a TA within the Mathematics Department, who was recently nominated for the 2010 Teaching Assistants’ Training Program (TATP) Teaching Excellence Award.  Out of 189 nominated TAs (with over 500 nominations) he was one of 12 chosen to be short-listed for the award.

The purpose of the award is to recognize outstanding achievements of teaching assistants across all four divisions in the School of Graduate Students at the University of Toronto.  It is a great achievement for Andrew and once again recognizes the excellence in our TAs within the department.

When asked about the nomination and if he had any advice to give to other fellow TAs Andrew had the following to say:

Andrew Holm

Andrew Holm was recently short-listed for the 2010 TATP Teaching Excellence Awards

“I have always felt a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment when I help others and share my knowledge and experiences to further their learning. For that reason, I have always aspired to be a teacher.

I think that teaching offers an opportunity to instil a love of learning into students, while the same time, playing a role in the shaping of our future.

Teaching is an ongoing learning process. Through experience and feedback from students and other teachers, I hope to continually improve my own teaching abilities.

In addition to providing important learning opportunities, teachers need to foster good character development by modelling kindness, respect, and good citizenship.

I believe I posses all these traits which are some reasons why I was selected for this award.”

The Department extends it’s congratulations to Andrew for this honoured nomination!

Student Poster Wins Prestigious CMS Award

Xiao Liu's Poster Presentation

Xiao Liu shows his poster on "Numerical Simulations of Resonant Tunneling of Fast Solitons for Nonlinear Schrodinger Equations"

Xiao Liu, a second year PhD student currently working with Professor Catherine Sulem, was recently honoured by the CMS for his poster presentation on “Numerical Simulations of Resonant Tunneling of Fast Solitons for Nonlinear Schrodinger Equations”.

In the student poster session three posters were chosen to receive a prize; one by AARMS, one by the President of the CMS and one by the CMS Student Committee.  Xiao Liu was honoured to receive the CMS President’s  Award.

Xiao presented his poster at the 2010 CMS Summer Meeting to attendees.  The event itself attracts mathematicians from across the country and is designed to highlight and honour the best mathematicians.  It is a series of lectures, seminars, poster presentations and socials designed to bring mathematicians together.  This year’s event was held in Fredericton, New Brunswick from June 4 – 6, 2010.

Xiao Liu's CMS Award

Xiao Liu's CMS President's Award