Equipment and Facilities

Fields Institute. The University of Western Ontario is a Principal Sponsoring University of the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences. Graduate students in the Mathematical Sciences have an opportunity to participate in special programs offered through the Institute and receive course credit (where appropriate).


Computer facilities. Every graduate student in the Department of Mathematics is provided with a personal computer for his/her exclusive use. These computer are either Pentium II or Pentium III with Windows 98/ME or Linux, or dual-boot with both. The Department has a Local Area Network (LAN) connected to the Internet, with access from each desk. The software provided and maintained by the Department (available from the file server) consists of a TeX distribution and Matlab licences, while the University maintains a campus wide all-platform site license for Maple. The University also maintains licences for many on-line databases. In particular, all on-line resources of the American Mathematical Society, including MathSciNet (Math Reviews), are available from each workstation in the department.

The Department has a small Beowulf cluster, initially consisting of two servers each with two gigabytes of memory and two 1GHz cpus, coupled by gigabit ethernet. By September 2003 this cluster will be at least three times as large. The cluster is intended to be used for the development of projects that will ultimately use the Beowulf cluster known as SHARCNet, the largest academic cluster in Canada.

The University also provides each student with an email account at no charge including dial-up access to the full suite of Internet applications from off-campus.


Library information. Our science library, the Allyn and Betty Taylor Library, is one of six libraries at the University of Western Ontario and is one of the largest science libraries in Canada. The Taylor Library houses approximately 750,000 volumes, has seating for 1,000, with approximately 90 computer workstations and 10 laptop ports. As well, the library system is available over the net.

At present, there are subscriptions to approximately 4,000 journals in the Taylor library, of which approximately 240 are on mathematics. In addition to electronic access which is provided through print subscriptions, Western Libraries also subscribes to JSTOR (Journal Storage), a growing database which contains the archives of major journals in a variety of academic disciplines, including 11 mathematics journals of direct relevance to academic research, and to Project Euclid, a joint effort by Cornell University Library and Duke University Press with mission to advance scholarly communication in the field of theoretical and applied mathematics and statistics.

For more information on library services and to access the online public catalogue, visit the University Library System website at www.lib.uwo.ca