Gaston H. Gonnet is a

Uruguay Uruguay, officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay, is a country in South America. It shares borders with Argentina to its west and southwest and Brazil to its north and northeast, while bordering the Río de la Plata to the south and the A ...

Canadian Canadians () are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of their being ''C ...

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

and entrepreneur. He is best known for his contributions to the Maple computer algebra system and the creation of a digital version of the

Oxford English Dictionary The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP), a University of Oxford publishing house. The dictionary, which published its first editio ...

Education and early life

Gonnet received his doctorate in computer science from the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a Public university, public research university located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to uptown Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also op ...

in 1977. His thesis was entitled ''Interpolation and Interpolation-Hash Searching''. His advisor was J. Alan George.

Career and research

In 1980 Gonnet co-founded the Symbolic Computation Group at the University of Waterloo. The work of SCG on a general-purpose

computer algebra system A computer algebra system (CAS) or symbolic algebra system (SAS) is any mathematical software with the ability to manipulate mathematical expressions in a way similar to the traditional manual computations of mathematicians and scientists. The de ...

later formed the core of the

Maple ''Acer'' is a genus of trees and shrubs commonly known as maples. The genus is placed in the soapberry family Sapindaceae.Stevens, P. F. (2001 onwards). Angiosperm Phylogeny Website. Version 9, June 2008 nd more or less continuously updated si ...

system. In 1988, Gonnet co-founded (with

Keith Geddes Keith Oliver Geddes (born 1947) is a professor emeritus in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science within the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. He is a former director of thSymbolic Computation ...

) the private company

Waterloo Maple Waterloo Maple Inc. is a Canadian software company, headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario. It operates under the trade name Maplesoft. It is best known as the manufacturer of the Maple computer algebra system, and MapleSim physical modeling and s ...

Inc., to sell Maple commercially. In the mid-1990s the company ran into trouble and a disagreement between his colleagues caused him to withdraw from chairing of the board and managerial involvement. In 1984 Gonnet co-founded the New Oxford English Dictionary project at the University of Waterloo, which sought to create a searchable electronic version of the

. The project was selected by the

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the publishing house of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world. Its first book was printed in Oxford in 1478, with the Press officially granted the legal right to print books ...

as a partner for the computerisation leading to the publication of the second edition of the OED. The University of Waterloo project's main contributions were in the parsing of the source text to enhance the tagging and on building a full text searching system based on PAT trees (a version of

suffix array In computer science, a suffix array is a sorted array of all suffixes of a string. It is a data structure used in, among others, full-text indices, data-compression algorithms, and the field of bibliometrics. Suffix arrays were introduced by as ...

). This project later culminated in another successful commercial venture, the Open Text Corporation. Gonnet was founder and chairman of the Board of OTC until 1994. Gonnet is a computer science professor at

ETH Zurich ETH Zurich (; ) is a public university in Zurich, Switzerland. Founded in 1854 with the stated mission to educate engineers and scientists, the university focuses primarily on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. ETH Zurich ran ...

Zurich Zurich (; ) is the list of cities in Switzerland, largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is in north-central Switzerland, at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich. , the municipality had 448,664 inhabitants. The ...

Switzerland Switzerland, officially the Swiss Confederation, is a landlocked country located in west-central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany to the north, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east. Switzerland ...

. In 1991, he began developing the Darwin programming language for biosciences, which would become the basis for OMA, a package and database for gene orthology prediction. He is chief scientist of two Canadian startups: CeeqIT and Porfiau.

Awards and honours

On June 9, 2011, Gonnet and Keith O. Geddes received the ACM Richard D. Jenks Memorial Prize for Excellence in Software Engineering Applied to Computer Algebra for the Maple Project. On March 14, 2013, Gonnet was awarded a Dr. Honoris Causa by the

Universidad de la República The University of the Republic (, sometimes ''UdelaR'') is a public research university in Montevideo, Uruguay. It is the country's oldest and largest university, as well as one of the largest public universities in South America in terms of en ...

, engineering faculty from Uruguay. https://www.fing.edu.uy/index.php/es/noticias/area-de-comunicaci%C3%B3n/entrega-de-t%C3%ADtulo-doctor-honoris-causa-al-doctor-gast%C3%B3n-gonnet/ref>

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gonnet, Gaston Living people OpenText Scientific computing researchers Swiss computer scientists University of Waterloo alumni Uruguayan computer scientists Uruguayan expatriates in Canada Uruguayan expatriates in Switzerland Uruguayan people of French descent Place of birth missing (living people) 1948 births Academic staff of ETH Zurich

Education and early life

Career and research

Awards and honours

See also

References