Did you know?
The David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science has:
- More than 80 faculty
- Nearly 300 graduate students
- 2800 undergraduate students
- Ranked 24th Computer Science department in the world, 10th in North America by QS.
- Four Fellows of the Royal Society, 5 ACM Fellows, three IEEE Fellows, three Canada Research Chairs, 13 Ontario Early Researcher Award winners
- Graduated the youngest graduate student, Erik Demaine, who was just over 14 years old when he enrolled at Waterloo and is now a professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- Research collaborations with institutions in China, France, Brazil, the United States of America, and many more.
- Participated in the ACM programming contest for nearly 21 years, having brought home a medal 17 times, and winning the contest in both 1994 and 1999.
Think about this...
The first computer, an IBM 610, was acquired for student use in 1960.
In 1966 the IBM 360/75 was purchased for $3 000 000 more than the entire MC building. It was the largest computer in Canada and housed in the infamous Red Room.
In the 1980's, the University of Waterloo was producing roughly one third of Canada's computer science graduates.
Back in the 1970's-1980's, any student that could demonstrate crashing the computer system was treated to a drink for exposing a weakness. To future students: this policy is no longer valid.
The pink tie originated as one of Ralph Stanton's eccentric habits. It is speculated that the founder of the Math Faculty merely did his laundry in the runoff from a red roof after a friend accidentally dyed his undergarments a similar colour while staying there.
Waterloo's developments
Waterloo established Canada's first Bioinformatics undergraduate degree program.
Waterloo had a hand in creating both Maple Software and OpenText. Maple Software spawned from a symbolic algebra system created here and OpenText was a spin off of the project to computerize the Oxford English Dictionary.
Some Academy Award winners are graduates of Waterloo's Computer Graphics Lab. This is the same lab that has created a computer brush model that learns to mimic the style of its user.
Amazing accomplishments
Tony Lai
Mr. Lai is the youngest graduate student of the University. He was only 14 years, 9 months old when he entered Waterloo. He was only 18 years, 5 months old when he successfully defended his thesis, "Efficient Maintenance of Binary Search Trees", in 1990 - the same age as the average first year student.
Marceli Wein
Marceli Wein, adjunct professor of computer science, won an Academy Award in 1997 shared with Nestor Burtnyk for their work on computer assisted key framing for character animation. A demonstration of this technique can be found below.
