Speakers
Take a look at the roster of plenary and public speakers for the 2024 Winter Meeting of the Canadian Mathematical Society
Dr Florence Glanfield is a Citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta, a professor of mathematics education, and Vice-Provost Indigenous Programming and Research, at the University of Alberta.
Dr Glanfield’s research interests explore the experiences that individuals (teachers and learners) as well as collectives of learners / communities have with mathematics and learning mathematics. Dr Glanfield collaborates with colleagues and has engaged in research projects with Indigenous communities across
the land now known as Canada, urban Aboriginal youth, elementary & secondary mathematics teachers, and mathematics teachers and mathematics teacher educators in Tanzania.
Two of Dr Glanfield’s current research projects are with colleagues from across Canada around the ways in which Indigenous and ‘Western’ knowledge systems interact in mathematics and science education.
Dr Glanfield’s career has included opportunities to work with students and teachers in all regions of Canada, in the US, in Tanzania and in Rwanda; teach high school mathematics; work with a provincial ministry of education to develop provincial mathematics curriculum, participate in implementation of provincial curriculum, and develop student assessment materials; develop student and teacher materials; and organize national and international fora.
Dr Glanfield’s been actively involved in, and has served in leadership roles with provincial, national, and international mathematics education professional organizations.
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STEVEN RAYAN
UNIVERSITY OF
SASKATCHEWAN
Plenary Lecture
Dr. Steven Rayan (he/him) is a pure mathematician and quantum scientist who has been based at the University of Saskatchewan (USask) since 2016. He earned his doctoral degree from the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford in 2011 and subsequently spent time at the University of Toronto as a postdoctoral researcher. In his career so far, Dr. Rayan has specialized in constructions and questions in complex algebraic geometry and representation theory, especially those arising from physics. In recent
years, he has worked in pure and applied aspects of quantum matter and quantum computing, often utilizing algebro-geometric perspectives that are atypical in these areas. In addition to his role as a Professor of Mathematics at USask, Dr. Rayan leads the Quantum Innovation Signature Area of Research and directs the Centre for Quantum Topology and Its Applications, also known as quanTA, which he founded in 2019. His work in quantum materials has been highlighted in Scientific American twice in the past three years, and one of his recent papers in the area was recently a finalist for the prestigious Cozzarelli Prize of the US National Academy of Sciences, selected from over 3200 papers. His research is generously funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Tri-Agency New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF), the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), PrairiesCan (through the Regional Innovation Ecosystem Program), and the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS). After receiving his NFRF funding, Dr. Rayan served at the national level in Canada as a co-chair of the multidisciplinary review committees for the NFRF Exploration Stream competition between 2020 and 2022. Dr. Rayan also represents the University of Saskatchewan in the Canada-France Quantum Alliance (CAFQA), and he serves as the main academic partner for a number of collaborations with companies in the quantum industry ecosystem both within Canada and beyond.
Trevor Wooley
Purdue
University
Plenary Lecture
Trevor Wooley is Andris A. Zoltners Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Purdue University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Pure Mathematics from Imperial College, London in 1990, under the direction of Bob Vaughan. Following a postdoctoral year at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Wooley joined the faculty of the University of Michigan, serving as Chair from 2002 to 2005. After a period at the University of Bristol, he joined the faculty of Purdue University in 2019. Wooley's research in analytic number theory is focused on the application of analytic methods for Diophantine problems, and incorporates interests in additive​
combinatorics and discrete harmonic analysis. His work in the 1990's using smooth numbers and efficient differencing led to what are still essentially the strongest known bounds on the number of summands required in Waring's problem, which seeks to represent large positive integers as sums of positive integral k-th powers. More recent work starting in 2010, introducing the so-called efficient differencing method, delivered fundamental progress on Vinogradov's mean value theorem, and ultimately gave an independent proof of the main conjecture established by Bourgain, Demeter and Guth in 2016.
Amongst Wooley's 27 past and current Ph.D. students, Greg Martin is undoubtedly the most famous currently working in British Columbia.
Wooley's work has been recognised by 45-minute invited addresses at the 2002 ICM in Beijing and 2014 ICM in Seoul, by election to Fellowship of the Royal Society (the UK's National Academy of Sciences) in 2007 and Fellowship of the AMS in 2012, and by the award of the Salem Prize in 1998 and Frohlich Prize of the LMS in 2014. His work has been supported by Sloan and Packard Fellowships, as well as by funding from the National Science Foundation, European Research Council, and the Royal Society.
Mark Lewis
University of
Victoria
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Public Lecture
Mark Lewis is Gilbert and Betty Kennedy Chair in Mathematical Biology at the University of Victoria. He develops applies new mathematical methods to solve problems in ecology and environmental biology. With a research focus in spatial ecology, he has supervised over 90 graduate students and postdocs and has published 8 books and almost 300 papers. Research prizes include the CRM-Fields-PIMS Prize for Exceptional Research in Mathematics, the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Research Prize and the Okubo Prize.
He is former Chief Editor of the Journal of Mathematical Biology and is former President of Society for Mathematical Biology and of the Canadian Mathematical Society. He is a Fellow of the Fields Institute, the Society for Mathematical Biology, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Canadian Mathematical Society and the Royal Society of Canada.
Florence Glanfield
University
of Alberta
Plenary Lecture