Education
University of Waterloo.
University of Waterloo.
He is best known for his contributions to the Maple computer algebra system and the creation of an electronic version of the Oxford English Dictionary. 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.
In 1980 Gonnet co-founded the Symbolic Computation Group at the University of Waterloo. The work of Structural Civil Geotechnical on a general-purpose computer algebra system later formed the core of the Maple system.
In 1988, Gonnet co-founded (with Keith Geddes) the private company Waterloo Maple Incorporated., to sell Maple commercially. In the mid 90"s the company ran into trouble and a disagreement between his colleagues caused him to withdraw from chairman of the Board and managerial involvement.
In 1984 Gonnet co-founded the New Oxford English Dictionary project at UW, which sought to create a searchable electronic version of the Oxford English Dictionary.
The project was selected by the Oxford University Press as a partner for the computerisation leading to the publication of the second edition of the OED. The UW 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). This project later culminated in another successful commercial venture, the Open Text Corporation. Gonnet is a professor in Informatik at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich in Zurich, Switzerland, and chief scientist of two Canadian startups: CeeqIT and Porfiau.
On March 14, 2013 Gonnet was awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa by the Universidad de la República, engineering faculty from Uruguay.