The University of Toronto (UofT) is one of the top public universities in the world, and located in an interesting, diverse, and safe city. Here are a few facts and relevant links:

• Canada is one of the G8 countries, the 10th largest GDP in the world, and a population of 38 million growing at about 1% per year. Official languages are English and French, but 19% of the population has neither of these as their mother tongue. Three-quarters of the population is employed in the service industry, but we are a net exporter of energy and agriculture products. Canada is the world's second-largest country by area. Nunavut, the northern territory inhabitied by Inuit, is as large as western Europe and includes the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world, Alert. However Toronto, at 43N, lies further south than Florence, Marseilles, and Portland.

• The Toronto department of physics has been granting Ph.D.s since 1900. It has a strong history in optics and in condensed matter. In 1923 helium was liquified at UofT, the second place in the world, after Leiden. Early low-temperature physics research was done in the department, and Toronto graduates Jack Allen and Don Misener went on to Cambridge to discover superfluidity (simultaneously with Kapitza in moscow) and demonstrate the fountain effect.

• In the post-war era, two would-be Nobel laureates (Art Schawlow and Bertram Brockhouse) earned their doctorates here. In the 1960s, Boris Stoicheff pioneered the application of lasers to spectroscopy (Raman spectroscopy and Brillouin scattering).

• In current world rankings the University of Toronto stands at 18th according the Times Higher Education list (2020), 4th in the NTU rankings (2019), and 24th in the Shanghi ranking (2020).

• The cultural and racial diversity of the UofT student body is a reflection of the city we live in. Half of Toronto's population was born outside of Canada. Not only does this make a fun city, but also contributes to the healthy social and scientific community here.

• Toronto is ranked in the top ten most livable cities by the Economist, one of the fastest growing G8 financial centers, and is also among the 10 safest cities in the world.