Professor Peter Forsyth received the honour of Distinguished Professor Emeritus from the University of Waterloo at the spring 2017 convocation ceremony.
Professor
Forsyth
has
made
significant
contributions
to
research,
teaching
and
administration
at
Waterloo
since
arriving
in
1987,
following
some
time
at
Calgary
and
after
completing
his
PhD
at
Western.
He
has
had
a
prolific
research
career,
including
authoring
nearly
130
journal
publications,
six
refereed
book
chapters
and
32
conference
proceedings
and
professional
publications.
His
research
area
is
scientific
computation,
which
he
has
linked
closely
with
his
interest
in
industrial
applications.
Early
in
his
career
he
developed
fast
algorithms
for
sparse
matrix
solvers
and
their
use
in
reservoir
and
groundwater
simulations.
Later
he
moved
into
the
general
area
of
computational
finance,
where
he
quickly
became
one
of
the
world’s
foremost
experts.
Professor Forsyth is well known for his many contributions to administration at Waterloo, having served as director of the Institute for Computer Research, vice-director of the School of Computer Science, and as scientific director of the Institute for Quantitative Finance and Insurance. A milestone was his efforts, along with Johnny Wong, to manage the process of the naming the School of Computer Science, which resulted in a significant endowment.
Professor Forsyth was instrumental in creating the Computing and Financial Management program. Over his career, he supervised 13 PhD students to completion, as well as 45 MMath students. From 2008 to 2013 he was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Computational Finance, the top journal in the field, and he has been an associate editor for a number of other journals.
“Peter’s many contributions throughout his academic career span the gamut, from brilliance in computational finance and scientific computing research, to innovative contributions in education, to constructive and dedicated administrative service,” said Mark Giesbrecht, Director of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. “His pioneering work helped establish computational finance as a new research area.”