Gaston H. Gonnet

Professor, ETH Zürich, Switzerland, Informatik, Institute for Scientific Computation

GhG Dec/1997

Topics of interest

Symbolic and algebraic computation, in particular solving equations (symbolically and numerically), system development, limit and series computation and heuristic algorithms. Co-founder in 1980 of the Symbolic Computation Group at the University of Waterloo, the research group that produced Maple. (SCG).

Computational Biochemistry algorithms. Director of the Computational Biochemistry Research Group CBRG. Development of the Darwin system and server for these computations.

Design and analysis of algorithms, in particular searching, text searching and sorting algorithms.

New Oxford English Dictionary project at the University of Waterloo, co-founder in 1984 of the Centre for the New OED.
Vice president and member of the Steering Committee of the OpenMath Society, a project which aims at developing a standard character-based communication protocol for mathematical objects.

Industrial Contributions

Founder of Waterloo Maple Inc. (WMI).
Founder of Open Text Corporation (OTC).
Founder, chairman and chief scientist of Web Pearls Inc. (WPI).
Founder, chairman and CTO of Freedom Intelligence (FI).
Founder of Skills Online Gmbh (Heidelberg, Germany) (SkOl).
Co-founder and Chief Scientist at ARUNA, where he is involved in the area of sequence analysis.

Work related pages

Handbook of Algorithms and Data Structures (published by Addison Wesley), WWW version. (For the people who want to acquire it, it is available in this on-line bookstore). Code for the algorithms.
Paper at the 6th OpenMath Workshop, Zürich, July 1996
Paper presented at the 8th OpenMath Workshop, Nice, May 23-24, 1997. A programming CD.
Minutes of the discussions at the 6th OpenMath Workshop, Zürich, July 1996
Protein identification from the molecular weight of its fragments Heidelberg, Dec. 3, 1992 (and at other invited talks) HTML version.
Probabilistic Ancestral Sequences and Multiple Alignments, in Proceedings of the 5th SWAT conference, Reykjavik, Iceland, July 1996. LNCS Springer-Verlag pp. 380-391. HTML version, postscript version.
Teaching Mathematics Through the Internet: Web Pearls' Approach, Invited talk at the 9th Open Math workshop, Talahassee, Nov 13, 1998, (and at the Dept of Mathematics, NC State, April 23, 1999). Slides.
Partial inverse heuristic for the approximate solution of non-linear equations, to appear in the proceedings of CASC99. HTML version, Slides presented as an invited talk at ECCAD99, postscript version.
Vertex cover heuristic algorithm and lower bound. Automatic Web-based server..
The Darwin Manual, coauthored with Mike Hallett, HTML version, postscript version.
Notes for the course Computer Algebra II: Heuristic Algorithms. HTML version, postscript version.
Optimal Scoring Matrices for Estimating Distances Between Aligned Sequences. (sumitted), coauthored with Chantal Korostensky. HTML version, postscript version.
Using Insertion and Deletion Events for Improving Multiple Sequence Alignments and Building the Corresponding Evolutionary Tree. (submitted), coauthored with Chantal Korostensky and Ulrike Stege. HTML version, postscript version.
Using Traveling Salesman Problem Algorithms for Evolutionary Tree Construction. (submitted) coauthored with Chantal Korostensky. HTML version, postscript version.
Near Optimal Multiple Sequence Alignments Using a Travelling Salesman Problem Approach. to appear in SPIRE '99, coauthored with Chantal Korostensky. HTML version, postscript version.
Evaluation measures of multiple sequence alignments. Journal of Computational Biochemistry (to appear) (1999), coauthored with Chantal Korostensky and Steve A. Benner. HTML version, postscript version.
Automatic program generation using a Computer Algebra System: Efficiency and Correctness ACAT2000, Fermilab, Batavia Il, Oct. 16, 2000 HTML version.
String matching problems from Bioinformatics which still need better solutions SPIRE 2002, Lisboa, September 13, 2002 Extended abstract. Slide presentation.
Analysis of the accuracy of system mathematical functions. A rather demanding test of numerical accuracy of most transcendental functions. September 2002.
Bio-recipes (Bioinformatics recipes) in Darwin. Bio-recipes are a collection of Darwin example programs. They show how to program in Darwin in order to solve standard and research problems in Bioinformatics.
Computing Phylogenetic Trees Based on Mithchondrial DNA (Eve's Tree) Joint 33rd Speedup and 19th PARS Workshop, Pharmazentrum, Basel, March 20th, 2003 Slide presentation.
Repeating Time Test for U(0,1) Random Number Generators, Electronic publication, May, 2003, Program and documentation.
Numerical Analysis, Computer Algebra and Bioinformatics: Having Fun with Optimization, SVG 2004, Stanford, January 10, 2004 Slide presentation.
The tPI (tRNA Pairing Index), a mathematical measure of repetition in a (biological) sequence, Proceedings of the World Computer Congress, IFIP, Aug 25, 2004, Toulouse, France. Full paper, bio-recipe.
Some old papers and conference slides can be found here.

Some group pictures

Picture of the arrival of the first scientific computer (and IBM 360-44) in Uruguay in 1968. From left to right, Dr. Manuel Sadosky, Unidentified person behind him, Gaston Gonnet, Cora Sadosky, Rafael Laguardia, Mrs. Laguardia, Luis Osin and Jorge Vidart.
Picture of the participants of the Maple retreat on Saturday, June 20th, 1998. Wild Echo Lodge, Port Stanton, Sparrow Lake, Ontario.
Pictures of the Latin2000 conference in Punta del Este, Uruguay, April 10-14, 2000.
Four authors of the LambertW paper, G. Gonnet, R. Corless, D. Knuth and D. Jeffrey. Waterloo, October 20, 2000.
Personal family pictures for 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007.

Other information

Address
Institute for Computational Sciences
Universitaetstrasse 19, UNG F12.1
8092 Zürich, Switzerland
Phone: +41-1-632-7470
Email: gonnet@inf.ethz.ch
Homepage: http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/gonnet/

Click here to send me email.
Up back to this server's main home page.
Last update: Wed Nov 13 15:24:00 CET 2002