David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
| David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science | |
|---|---|
| Former names |
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| Type | Professional school |
| Parent institution | Faculty of Mathematics |
| Academic affiliation | University of Waterloo |
| Location | Waterloo, Ontario, Canada |
| Director | Mark Giesbrecht |
| Academic staff | 80 |
| Undergraduates | 2,800 |
| Postgraduates | 300 |
| Website | cs |
The David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science is one of the units in the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo. The school comprises 80 faculty members, over 300 graduate students, approximately 2900 undergraduates, and 46 staff members. It has been consistently ranked among the top computer science programs worldwide. In 2014 QS World University Rankings ranked the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science 24th in the world, 10th in North America and 2nd in Canada in Computer Science in 2014. U.S. News & World Report ranked the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science 18th in world, 10th in North America and first in Canada. Business Insider magazine ranked the School #4 in the world for the "Most Grads at Facebook".
In 1965, when Mathematics was still a department within the Faculty of Arts, four third-year mathematics students (Richard Shirley, Angus German, James G. Mitchell, and Bob Zarnke) wrote the WATFOR compiler for the FORTRAN programming language, under the direction of lecturer Peter Shantz. "Within a year it would be adopted by computing centres in over eight countries, and the number of student users at UW increased to over 2500." Later on in 1966, two mathematics lecturers (Paul Dirksen and Paul H. Cress) led a team that developed WATFOR 360, for which they received the 1972 Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery.
UW's Faculty of Mathematics was later established in 1967. As a result, the Department of Applied Analysis and Computer Science (AA&CS) was created. By 1969, AA&CS had become the largest department in the faculty. At that point, the first two PhD degrees in computer science were awarded, to Byron L. Ehle, for a thesis on numerical analysis, and to Hugh Williams, for a thesis on computational number theory. In 1975 the department dropped the words "Applied Analysis" and became simply the Department of Computer Science.
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