Mark Giesbrecht

My research is in the area of Computer Algebra. For me this is the study of computational methods applied to problems in algebra, and the use of algebraic techniques in algorithms and complexity. Please see my Research page for more details. I am also involved in the computer algebra research community as an organizer, editor and referee. Please see my Professional page for information on these activities.

I am currently the Director of 1st year Computer Science. Until this past July I was Associate Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science. Since the School has around 75 faculty members, 300 graduate students, and about 2000 CS undergraduate students, this was (and is) an enormous job. See my Administration page if you really want to get into it.

I haven't been teaching that much lately (see above), but last winter I taught computer algebra (CS 487). I'm teaching CS 136 this coming Winter (2012). Please see my Teaching page for more information on my recent teaching. I have also been Director of the Undergraduate Studies at Waterloo (2002–2005), which includes curriculum design and implementation.

News

• The Hybrid 2011 Workshop on Symbolic-Numeric Computation took place on November 16–19, 2011 at the University of Waterloo. We saw lots of great talks on the synthesis of symbolic and numeric methods for important industrial and mathematical problems. Please see the website for more speakers, abstracts, and slides.
• MACIS 2011 took place at Beihang University in Beijing, and I was honoured to be an invited speaker. My abstract can be found here (scroll to the bottom).
• Fq10 (Finite Fields and their Applications) was a great meeting in beautiful Ghent, Belgium. If you are interested, my abstract is here, but there are many more interesting ones here!
• Jason Selby successfully defended his PhD thesis on July 8. Great job. In the daytime, Jason has been rewriting the garbage collector as a kernel developer at Maplesoft.
• ISSAC and SNC were part of FCRC (I actually went to some STOC and CC talks, for the first time in years). Their were three great tutorials by Agnes Szanto, Manuel Kauers and Peter Bürgisser (which I had the pleasure of organizing). Thanks to the speakers and all who attended. Great job Éric and Emil.
• Dan Roche successfully defended his PhD thesis on April 11. A very impressive piece of work (take a look for yourself here). Dan will be heading off to USNA as an Assistant Professor in August. Well done, Dan!
• ECCAD 2011 (the East Coast Computer Algebra Day) was held at the University of Waterloo on April 9, 2011. The talks and posters were great! Chris Brown (USNA), Victoria Powers (Emory), and Clément Pernet (U. Joseph Fourier) all gave talks on great new results without sacrificing accessibility. There were also some really interesting posters and lots of discussion. Thank you all for coming!
• ISSAC 2011 accepted papers are listed. Looks like another great conference. Pay special attention (and attend!) the tutorials.
• The DEAM2 Workshop (on Differential Equations by Algebraic Methods) took place at RISC Linz/Johannes Kepler University, from February 9-11, 2011. An excellent workshop with a diverse set of participants on a unifying theme. Thank you RISC!