CMS is organizing three-hour mini-courses to add more value to meetings and make them attractive for students and researchers to attend.
The mini-courses will be held on Friday afternoon, December 6th, before the public lecture, and include topics suitable for graduate students, postdocs and other interested parties. You don’t have to be registered for the meeting in order to register for mini courses.
Registration fees for the mini courses are:
Regular rate (Subject to Change) | |||
Students/Postdocs (members) | $50 | ||
Students/Postdocs (non-members) | $75 | ||
CMS Members | $100 | ||
CMS Non-Members | $150 |
Mini-Courses
Morning
9am - 12pm
Programming and Mathematics in Maple
Friday December 6th
9am - 12pm
Facilitator: Daniel Skoog, Maple Product Manager (Maplesoft)

Since its inception in the early 80’s at the University of Waterloo, the Maple programming language has been evolving to solve problems in many different mathematical and scientific domains.
In this three-hour hands-on workshop, you learn the basics of this uniquely Canadian programming language as well as learn more about recent trends in symbolic analysis, visualization, code translation, data analysis and user interface construction.
Newcomers to Maple, as well as experienced users who are interested in trying out the latest we have to offer, are welcome.
Requirements: Bring your laptops! Registrants will receive a 1-year copy of Maple that they can use in the course and then after!
Iwasawa Theory of Fine Selmer Groups
Friday December 6th
9am - 12pm
Sujatha Ramdorai and Debanjana Kundu
module theoretic structure of (fine) Selmer groups of elliptic curves. There is growing evidence
that conjectures in classical Iwasawa theory are equivalent to the conjectures on the side of elliptic
curves. We will explore some new partial results on either side of the story.
Mathematical Finance
Friday December 6th
9am - 12pm
Facilitator: Thomas S. Salisbury (York University and the Fields Institute)
NEW
Machine-learning methods for modeling biological processes
Friday December 6th
9am - 12pm
Facilitator: Pouria Ramazi
Geometric Quantization: Old and New
Friday December 6th
9am - 12pm
Speaker: Alejandro Uribe, University of Michigan
Facilitator: Mark Hamilton (Mount Allison), Yael Karshon (University of Toronto, Mississauga)
Geometric Quantization, introduced in the late 1960s by Kostant and Souriau, unifies ideas from quantum mechanics with the “orbit method” from representation theory. While many parts of the theory are well-developed, some of the deep, old mysteries of the subject (such as “independence of polarization” phenomena) are still unresolved, and there are exciting new connections to other areas of mathematics (of which mirror symmetry is one example). The purpose of this minicourse is to introduce participants to classical geometric quantization, and provide preparation for the session “Geometric quantization: old and new.”
Afternoon
1pm - 4pm
Control of Partial Differential Equations
Friday December 6th
1pm - 4pm
Facilitator: Kirsten Morris (Waterloo)
In many systems the physical quantity of interest depends on several independent variables. For instance, the temperature of an object depends on both position and time, as do structural vibrations and the temperature and velocity of water in a lake.
The state of a system modeled by an ordinary differential equation evolves on a finite-dimensional vector space. In contrast, the solution to a partial differential equation evolves on an infinite-dimensional space. For this reason, these systems are often called infinite-dimensional systems.
This creates challenging issues in stability analysis and more so in controller design. Another issue is the construction of estimation of the entire solution to the partial differential equations using only measurements taken at a finite number of points.
Although there are many similarities, the systems theory for infinite-dimensional systems differs in some important aspects from that of finite-dimensional systems.
Also, for systems modeled by PDEs, control system and estimator performance depends not only on the controller/estimator design but also on the location of the control and the measurements. Physical intuition does not always lead to the best choice of locations. Since it is often difficult to move hardware, and trial-and-error may not be effective when there are multiple sensors and actuators, mathematical analysis is crucial.
This short course will provide an introduction to control and systems theory for infinite-dimensional systems. It is expected that a previous course in PDEs and also in functional analysis has been obtained. No previous exposure to control systems theory is assumed.
Modeling and Dynamics of Mosquito Population and Transmission of Mosquito-borne Diseases
Friday December 6th
1pm - 4pm
Facilitator: Huaiping Zhu (York)
Vector mosquitoes and mosquito-borne diseases (MBDs) have become a severe burden of the public health. For prevention and control, it is essential to understand the triggers and mechanisms of an outbreak and repeated infestations. In this short course, I will first introduce some models for the population dynamics of vector mosquitoes. Compartmental models are used to study the transmission dynamics of MBDs. Dynamical system and bifurcation theory, and geometrical singular perturbation approach will be used to study the dynamics of the models to answer the two questions mathematically. I will present the local stability and lower codimension bifurcations to explain the triggering conditions for an outbreak and mechanisms for repeated outbreaks. I will also explain the global stability, existence, and non-existence of periodic solutions, multi-scale dynamics of the models, and the challenge of the study by connecting to Hilbert’s 16th problem. In the end, I will show our predictive modeling studies based on the surveillance data for weekly real-time forecasting of mosquito abundance and risk of West Nile virus in five regions of the Greater Toronto Area.
On the classification of simple nuclear C*-algebras
Friday December 6th
1pm - 4pm
Facilitator: Christopher Schafhauser
Topological Data Analysis
Friday December 6th
1pm - 4pm
Facilitator: Leland McInnes (Tutte Institute for Mathematics and Computing)
Vertex Pursuit Games on Graphs
Friday December 6th
3pm - 6pm
Facilitator: Anthony Bonato (Ryerson University)