User:William F. Smyth

I graduated in Mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1957, then spent ten years in the private sector, designing and developing software for scientific, engineering and business applications. In 1967 I joined the United Nations, and spent the next 15 years mostly in so-called "developing" countries, attempting to assist with management training and development, and with national computer policy. In 1982 I became an Adjunct Associate Professor at McMaster University with a one-year contract. In 1983 I completed my Master's degree in numerical analysis at the University of Ottawa (started in 1965), then became tenure-track at McMaster. I became tenured in 1986, received my PhD in computing from Curtin University, Western Australia, in 1990, and became a Professor at McMaster in 1992. Since 1988 I have done research in combinatorics on words and string algorithms. I have been a Visiting Professor in the Department of Informatics at King's College London since 2000, and I am a permanent member of the Algorithm Design Group there. Since 2000 I have been Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computing & Software at McMaster. To date (2012) I have published more than 150 research papers, a book (Computing Patterns in Strings), and I have edited numerous conference proceedings and special issues of journals.