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We are glad to announce that we will be continuing our tradition of hosting the 2025 edition of the OMSC! We hope to see you there.
The 2025 OMSC will be held from May 14th to May 16th - mark your calendars!
It’s the 18th Annual Ottawa Mathematics and Statistics Conference!
For the last few editions of the OMSC, we thought it would be fun to design a themed logo around the mathematical properties of that number edition. For the 16th edition, we had a colorful grid of squares – four by four, of course. The next year, we went for a slightly more obscure fact. Did you know that 17 is the only prime number that is the sum of four consecutive primes? This gave us the idea to make the logo a stylised Young diagram for this cool partition. Now, we are thrilled to be hosting the 18th edition of the OMSC! The trouble is, what makes the number 18 special? Unfortunately, it’s not some amazing prime. Its partitions are (in our opinions) mediocre. We had to go even more obscure than last year…
Did you know there are 18 unique pentominoes? These are polygons made of 5 equal-sized squares connected edge to edge (think Tetris, except Tetris uses tetrominoes).
But how to use these for our logo? We had to find some exciting tiling. Conveniently, there is an entire area of combinatorics dedicated to polyomino tiling! There are lots and lots of pentomino tilings and packings on a variety of surfaces, but we can up the ante by requiring additional constraints around symmetry and colouring. In researching this topic, we found a great example of exactly this type of puzzle.
Can we tile a rectangle using all 18 one-sided pentominoes so that they have a proper 3-coloring satisfying the following properties:
“The six pentominoes that are symmetric over reflection are the same colour.”
“The other twelve pentominoes are coloured with the remaining two colours so that the pentominoes that are reflections of each other are different colours?”
*Spoiler Alert*: This is impossible. (Feel free to give it a shot or find a proof that it cannot be done. If you do find a proof, we would love to see it!)
It turns out that we can have such a colouring on a tiling of a different shape that is almost a rectangle. Check out our logo above! How many different shapes can you find that admit a tiling with these constraints?
More about the conference
The Ottawa Mathematics and Statistics Conference (OMSC) provides a venue for graduate students in mathematics and statistics to showcase their original research. Alongside the student talks, expert mathematicians from Canadian universities and industry will give keynote talks. Participants are encouraged to submit abstracts for contributed talks during which they can present their original research or interesting mathematical topics. We will also be hosting a Three-Minute Thesis competition; students are welcome to register with a thesis title. Moreover, to facilitate networking, we will be hosting a variety of social events. Although this conference is built for graduate students in mathematics and statistics programs, the conference remains open to all undergraduate students and post-doctoral researchers wishing to participate.
The conference will be hosted in-person at the University of Ottawa from May 14 - 16, 2024. You must register to attend, contribute a talk, or compete in the 3MT competition. Registration is now open.
Coffee and lunch will be offered to all registered participants.
This year's Proceedings Booklet will be available soon. In the meantime, make sure to check out last years' booklets by clicking here.
List of participants:
Samuel Desrochers
Zirui Wang
Thais Bardini Idalino
Ruchita Amin
Khalil Besrour
Luke Cooper
Ziming An
Bennett Punyat Hon
Amanda Lynn Chafee
Niall Larney
Desiree Paczay
Masoomeh Akbari
Sarah Abel
Mariam Elsayed
Niccolò Mattarei
Saima Samchuck-Schnarch
Nilanjana Chakraborty
Ruikun Zhou
Armin Mohammadioroojeh
Hamed Abdollahzadeh
Jerin Tasnim Farin
Samrat Roy
Jesse Niyo
Thomas Moran
Ali Selseleh
Yukta Mendiratta
Morganna Hinds
Sahil Agarwal
Sophie Tomlin
Kamyar Hazaveh
Améli Comtois
Minh Dinh
Farhad Soltani
Prangya Parida
Mico Luo
Mariia Yermolenko
Mithun Manivannan
Angela-Frances Osehiemen Ibhade
Simon Larose
Atonzong Guedia Dorchelle
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