Leili Rafiee Sevyeri, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cheriton School of Computer Science’s Symbolic Computation Group, is one of four recipients of the Applications of Computer Algebra Early Researcher Award. Conferred at the recent Applications of Computer Algebra conference, the award recognizes early-career researchers who show strong potential for significant impact and future leadership in the area of symbolic computation.
Dr. Leili Rafiee Sevyeri works under the supervision of Cheriton School of Computer Science Professors Mark Giesbrecht and George Labahn and Professor Rob Corless from Western University. She is an associate editor of Maple Transactions, an open-access refereed journal on computer-assisted research in mathematics, applications, and education.
Dr. Rafiee Sevyeri received her PhD in applied mathematics with scientific computing in 2020, working under the supervision of Professor Corless at Western University, who is also an adjunct professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science. She was a visiting researcher at the Cheriton School of Computer Science’s Symbolic Computation Group from 2018 to 2020. Her area of research falls under the banner of hybrid symbolic and numeric computation, a discipline in which exact algebraic problems are solved but whose coefficient information is numeric.
Dr. Rafiee Sevyeri has twice won best poster awards at ISSAC — the International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation — the top conference in symbolic computation. She has published in SIAM Review and Experimental Mathematics, two journals in her field, as well as presented conference papers at ISSAC and other top conferences in computer algebra. She was the principal organizer of the Hybrid Symbolic–Numeric Session at ACA 2021, with Professors George Labahn, Mark Giesbrecht and Rob Corless.
“Leili arrived to grad school with a strong background in algebra, and a decidedly algebraic point of view,” said Professor Corless. “She readily adapted to the more analytic and numerical aspects of her master’s and PhD theses, but never forgot the importance of algebraic structures for computation.”
This allowed her to contribute substantially to a paper titled On Parametric Linear System Solving, which made a significant advance on a very difficult problem arising at the intersection of algebra and numerics.
“Leili was recommended to me by Professor Lindi Wahl, who was grad chair at the time of her application,” Professor Corless continued. “I respect Professor Wahl’s opinions greatly, and this recommendation shows why. Leili’s background and aptitudes were a perfect fit for our research group, and her time with us has been spectacularly productive. Perhaps my favourite is our joint work titled Stirling’s Original Asymptotic Series from a Formula Like One of Binet’s and its Evaluation by Sequence Acceleration, in which we explored a rather strange phenomenon that occurs when one uses sequence acceleration on Stirling’s original formula.”