Type | Academic department |
---|---|
Established | 1843 |
Parent institution | Faculty of Arts and Science University of Toronto |
Location | |
Website | math |
The University of Toronto Department of Mathematics is an academic department within the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto. It is located at the university's main campus at the Bahen Centre for Information Technology.
The University of Toronto was ranked first in Canada for Mathematics in 2018 by the QS World University Rankings, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and the Maclean's University Rankings. [1] [2] [3]
For most of the second half of the 19th century, the University of Toronto was the only English-language university in Canada to offer programs with specializations, one being in mathematics and natural philosophy. The university launched its mathematics program in 1877, which became a model for the rest of Canada during the first half of the 20th century. [4] The Mathematical and Physical Society was founded in 1882 as a mathematics student society. [5] : 83
In the early 20th century, the department became the first in North American to explore the field of actuarial science. At the same time, the University of Toronto's mathematics department increasingly took the lead on mathematical research in Canada. Faculty member John Charles Fields, appointed professor in 1902, was perhaps the most important in developing research at Toronto. [6] Fields organized the 1924 International Congress of Mathematicians held in Toronto, and would later found the Fields Medal. [4]
Fields's student, Samuel Beatty, was the first mathematics Ph.D. in Canada, obtaining his degree in 1915 (Beatty would later serve as head of the mathematics department and first president of the Canadian Mathematical Society in 1945). In the next twenty years, Toronto was to produce eight doctorates in mathematics, two of them women. [7]
The Department's competitive mathematics team, consisting of Irving Kaplansky, Nathan Mendelsohn and John Coleman, won first place in the first year of the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition in 1938. [5] : 94 While competition rules prevented the University of Toronto from entering a team the following year, the team in won again in 1940, 1942 and 1946. [4]
Meanwhile, the first Canadian mathematics journal, Canadian Journal of Mathematics , began publication by the University of Toronto Press in 1949, with faculty members Harold Coxeter and Gilbert de Beauregard Robinson as Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor, respectively. [6]
The department moved from University College to Baldwin House in 1958, and then to Sidney Smith Hall upon its completion in 1961. The statistics sub-department, first established in 1947, became a separate department in 1978. [5] : 87
The department was one of the founders of the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences in 1991. Initially based at the University of Waterloo, the institute is now located at the University of Toronto. In 2006, the Department of Mathematics moved to the sixth floor of the Bahen Centre for Information Technology, located directly behind the Fields Institute. [8]
Of the 120 current Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada in the discipline of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, 21 (or 18%) are members of the University of Toronto's Department of Mathematics. [9]
A number of individuals affiliated with the department have won international prizes for their research in mathematics, including the Fields Medal, the Wolf Prize, the Steele Prize, the Cole Prize, the Clay Research Award, and the Sloan Fellowship. [10] [11] [12] [13] [14]
In the 2018 QS World University Rankings, the University of Toronto was ranked nineteenth in the world in the subject of Mathematics. [1] The university was ranked first in Canada for Mathematics in 2018 by the Maclean's University Rankings, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and the QS World University Rankings. [3] [2]
Notable alumni of the Department include Arthur Dempster, Clifford Dowker, Donald Fraser, Irving Kaplansky, Walter Kohn, [15] J. Carson Mark (Ph.D. 1938), [16] Nathan Mendelsohn, John Mighton (Ph.D. 2000), [17] Robert Moody (Ph.D. 1966), Cathleen Morawetz, Gordon Slade, Robert Steinberg (Ph.D. 1948), James Stewart (Ph.D. 1967), [18] and Albert Tucker.
Stephen Arthur Cook is an American-Canadian computer scientist and mathematician who has made significant contributions to the fields of complexity theory and proof complexity. He is a university professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, Department of Computer Science and Department of Mathematics.
The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, commonly known simply as the Fields Institute, is an international centre for scientific research in mathematical sciences. It is an independent non-profit with strong ties to 20 Ontario universities, including the University of Toronto, where it occupies a purpose-built building on the St. George campus. Fields was established in 1992, and was briefly based at the University of Waterloo before relocating to Toronto in 1995.
The Faculty of Mathematics is one of six faculties of the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, offering more than 500 courses in mathematics, statistics and computer science. The faculty also houses the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, formerly the faculty's computer science department. There are more than 31,000 alumni.
Nassif A. Ghoussoub is a Canadian mathematician working in the fields of non-linear analysis and partial differential equations. He is a Professor of Mathematics and a Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia.
The CRM-Fields-PIMS Prize is the premier Canadian research prize in the mathematical sciences. It is awarded in recognition of exceptional research achievement in the mathematical sciences and is given annually by three Canadian mathematics institutes: the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques (CRM), the Fields Institute, and the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS).
Nicole Tomczak-Jaegermann FRSC was a Polish-Canadian mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the University of Alberta, and the holder of the Canada Research Chair in Geometric Analysis.
Edwin Arend Perkins, is a Canadian mathematician who has been Professor of Mathematics at the University of British Columbia since 1989 and Canada Research Chair in Probability since 2001. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1988 and to the Royal Society in 2007. He won the 2003 CRM-Fields-PIMS prize.
Jeremy Daniel Quastel, is a Canadian mathematician specializing in probability theory, stochastic processes, partial differential equations. He is currently head of the mathematics department at the University of Toronto. He grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, and now lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Vijaya Kumar Murty is an Indo-Canadian mathematician working primarily in number theory. He is a professor at the University of Toronto and is the Director of the Fields Institute.
Stevo Todorčević, is a Yugoslavian mathematician specializing in mathematical logic and set theory. He holds a Canada Research Chair in mathematics at the University of Toronto, and a director of research position at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris.
Bruce Alan ReedFRSC is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist, a former Canada Research Chair in Graph Theory at McGill University. His research is primarily in graph theory. He is a distinguished research fellow of the Institute of Mathematics in the Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria in Canada.
Daniel T. Wise is an American mathematician who specializes in geometric group theory and 3-manifolds. He is a professor of mathematics at McGill University.
John Richard Bond, also known as J. Richard Bond, is a Canadian astrophysicist and cosmologist.
Gordon Douglas Slade is a Canadian mathematician, specializing in probability theory.
David William Boyd is a Canadian mathematician who does research on harmonic and classical analysis, inequalities related to geometry, number theory, and polynomial factorization, sphere packing, number theory involving Diophantine approximation and Mahler's measure, and computer computations.
Catherine Sulem is a mathematician and violinist at the University of Toronto.
Demetri Terzopoulos is a Greek-Canadian-American computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is currently a Distinguished Professor and Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he directs the UCLA Computer Graphics & Vision Laboratory.
Niky Kamran is a Belgian and Canadian mathematician whose research concerns geometric analysis, differential geometry, and mathematical physics. He is a James McGill Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McGill University.
Eugenia Kumacheva is a University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of Toronto. Her research interests span across the fields of fundamental and applied polymers science, nanotechnology, microfluidics, and interface chemistry. She was awarded the L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science in 2008 "for the design and development of new materials with many applications including targeted drug delivery for cancer treatments and materials for high density optical data storage". In 2011, she published a book on the Microfluidic Reactors for Polymer Particles co-authored with Piotr Garstecki. She is Canadian Research Chair in Advanced Polymer Materials. She is Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC).
The Department of Mathematics and Statistics is an academic department at McGill University. It is located in Burnside Hall at McGill's downtown campus in Montreal.