Maksym and Kostya in front of the Fields Institute
Two Fields-MITACS summer undergraduate research project participants from the V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, Kostya Drach and Maksym Skoryk, have been in Toronto for just over two weeks. Even though it is their first time abroad they have adapted to their new settings very well. During their first week in Canada they bought bikes and explored the entire GTA in just a few days. They also get many chances to show off their proficiency in english.
Kostya and Maksym are the only students selected from a very highly competitive Ukrainian system but they remain modest about their achievement. In grade eleven, Kostya won a prize for the best presentation on the Closure Theorem at a country-wide conference. Maksym has been winning mathematical olympiads since grade six. It is no surprise that they were selected.
Kostya and Maksym are working on Symmetries of Euclidian Tesselations and Their Covers. It is too early to discuss where the project is going but they introduce the idea of the project in the following way: “Tessellations are a form of mosaic. The polytope mapped onto a torus from tessellation does not have to be a regular polytope and if it happens we can estimate the degree of unregularity counting the number of flag orbits.”
Kostya and Maksym noted that it is not completely clear how the work will be divided among the team members. They have never worked on a group research project and they are looking forward to more collaborative work.
Interview conducted by Mariya Boyko