Gaston Gonnet

Gaston H. Gonnet (born September 22, 1948) is a Uruguayan Canadian and Swiss computer scientist 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.

Education and early life Gonnet received his doctorate in computer science from the University of Waterloo 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. 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 was previously involved with two Canadian startups: CeeqIT and Porfiau and since 2018 has served as the Chief Scientist of Polyalgorithm Machine Learning, Inc.

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, engineering faculty from Uruguay.