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
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!
Grad Coordinator Staff Change
On July 1st, we sadly had to say "so long" and "thank you" to Nancy Maloney who retired from the Pure Math grad coordinator position. Nancy had been with Pure Math for over 16 years and will definitely be missed. We wish you all the best for a long, healthy, and restful retirement, Nancy!
And we say "welcome" to Jo-Ann Hardy who has taken over the grad coordinator role as of July 4th. We’re happy to have you with us, Jo-Ann! Welcome to Pure Math!
Events
Height Study Seminar
Research Area: Algebraic Geometry/Number Theory
Cynthia Dai
"Introduction to Naive Height"
In this seminar, we will be focusing on three results: Mordell-Weil theorem, Falting theorem, and potentially Vojta conjecture. If time permits, we will also try to cover Manin's conjecture for toric varieties. We will start slow and spend a one or two talks on naive heights on projective space, then define Weil heights for projective varieties, and study their properties. After this, we will focus on abelian varieties, and once we are familar with those objects, we introduce Neron-Tate heights, and finally prove the first main result we want to cover (actually, I think this will be all we can do this term).
For today's talk, I will review some algebraic number theory, then define Naive heights.
MC 5417
Student Number Theory Seminar
Jérémy Champagne
"Weyl's equidistribution theorem in function fields"
Finding a proper function field analogue to Weyl's theorem on the equidistribution of polynomial sequences is a problem that was originally considered by Carlitz in 1952. As noted by Carlitz, Weyl's classical differencing methods can only handle polynomials with degree less than the characteristic of the field. In this talk, we discuss some recent methods which avoid this "characteristic barrier", and we show the existence of polynomials with extremal equidstributive behaviour.
This is joint work with Yu-Ru Liu, Thái Hoàng Lê and Trevor D. Wooley.
MC 5403
Student Number Theory Seminar
AJ Fong
"Galois representations of the Picard groups of surfaces"
Algebraic geometry provides a natural framework to study solutions of Diophantine equations. I will sketch why the Picard group of a surface is interesting from the perspective of finding rational points.
MC 5403