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Gaston Gonnet Oral History An interview with Gaston Gonnet Conducted by Thomas Haigh On 16-18 March, 2005 Zurich, Switzerland Interview conducted by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, as part of grant # DE-FG02-01ER25547 awarded by the US Department of Energy. Transcript and original tapes donated to the Computer History Museum by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics © Computer History Museum Mountain View, California Gonnet, p. 2 ABSTRACT Born in Uruguay, Gonnet was first exposed to computers while working for IBM in Montevideo as a young man. This led him to a position at the university computer center, and in turn to an undergraduate degree in computer science in 1973. In 1974, following a military coup, he left for graduate studies in computer science at the University of Waterloo. Gonnet earned an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in just two and a half years, writing a thesis on the analysis of search algorithms under the supervision of Alan George. After one year teaching in Rio de Janeiro he returned to Waterloo, as a faculty member. In 1980, Gonnet began work with a group including Morven Gentleman and Keith Geddes to produce an efficient interactive computer algebra system able to work well on smaller computers: Maple. Gonnet discusses in great detail the goals and organization of the Maple project, its technical characteristics, the Maple language and kernel, the Maple library, sources of funding, the contributions of the various team members, and the evolution of the system over time. He compares the resulting system to MACSYMA, Mathematica, Reduce, Scratchpad and other systems. Gonnet also examines the licensing and distribution of Maple and the project’s relations to its users. Maple was initially used for teaching purposes within the university, but soon found users in other institutions. From 1984, distribution was handled by Watcom, a company associated with the university, and 1988, Gonnet and Geddes created a new company, Waterloo Maple Software, Inc. to further commercialize Maple, which established itself as the leading commercial computer algebra system. However, during the mid-1990s the company ran into trouble and disagreements with his colleagues caused Gonnet to withdraw from managerial involvement. Since then, he feels that Maple has lost its battle with Mathematica. Gonnet also discusses Maple’s relation to Matlab and its creator, Cleve Moler. From 1984 onward with Frank Tompa, Tim Bray, and other Waterloo colleagues, Gonnet worked on the production of computer software to support the creation of the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. This led to the creation of another startup company, Open Text, producing software for the searching and indexing of textual information within large corporations. Gonnet explains his role in the firm, including his departure and his feeling that it made a strategic blunder by not exploiting its early lead in Internet search. Gonnet continued to work in a number of areas of computer science, including analysis of algorithms. In 1990, Gonnet moved from Waterloo to ETH in Switzerland. Among his projects since then have been Darwin, a bioinformatics system for the manipulation of genetic data, and leadership of the OpenMath project to produce a standard representation for mathematical objects. He has been involved in several further startup companies, including Aruna, a relational database company focused on business intelligence applications. Gonnet, p. 3 HAIGH: Thank you very much for agreeing to take part in the interview. GONNET: You are very welcome. HAIGH: I wonder if you can begin by talking a little bit about your early life upbringing and family background? GONNET: Well I was born in Uruguay from my mother who was Austrian and my father who was Uruguayan from French parents. I went to school and university in Uruguay and in the early 1970s decided to do graduate studies abroad. The picture of the world, from where we were, was a little bit distorted, and it was actually very difficult to find, from South America, which were the good universities and so on. So you ended up making decisions on casual information, on hearsay. At the time there were two things that were important for anybody that was going abroad. One was the ability to fund yourself while you go abroad, and the other one was doing what you wanted to do. I wanted to do computer science; that was pretty clear. I had already an early start with computers, mostly linked to commercial applications of the IBM computers of the time. IBM was big on the University of Waterloo for teaching at that time, because the University of Waterloo had developed a system called WATFOR, which was a Fortran compiler that had very quick turn around. They were sending people from all over the place to Waterloo to show them how efficient they were. One of my professors had gone on one of those trips and he came back very impressed with the University of Waterloo. So that was one sample point of information that somehow became very influential. The other choice I had was to go to the University of Essex in England. I had been given a grant to do a master’s there by the British Council. But the British, being very cautious, were saying, “Oh, you should not bring your wife. This is very tough. We are going to give you just enough money to survive. We are going to guarantee only one year—whether you finish or not finish you are on your own,” and so on and so forth. It was so intimidating that I ended up deciding to go to Canada, even though Canada was not offering a grant; the only thing they were offering me was a teaching assistantship to fund myself. But I have to say that the English scared me at the time. Also I had a misinterpretation of what is a professor and what is a lecturer and so on. As I was reading information about the University of Essex, I heard that they were all proud that they have a new professorship. So a place that is so proud that it has one more professor sort of raised eyebrows. Well, it was just lack of understanding of the system. But the bottom line is that I ended up going to the University of Waterloo in Canada. HAIGH: Let me pull you back a little bit from that to talk about the period before you left for Canada. So as you were growing up and in school, had you always been particularly interested in science and mathematics? GONNET: Yes, I have to say that I had always been interested in mathematics. Mathematics came easily to me. It’s funny that my mother used to say, “Oh, he is good at math. This is really the dumb subject because he doesn’t really need to study much to be good at math.” So that was her excuse for, “You don’t work hard enough. You are good at the topics that you have to make no effort for,” instead of being a good student because you study a lot. I have to say that I was raised with my mother; my parents divorced when I was four and a half, so I had basically no contact with my father. So I was raised by my mother and a half brother of mine that was really my brother, who was 12 years older than I was. Gonnet, p. 4 It was a little bit of a hard life for me at the time, and I had to start working before going to university just to support myself and to support my family. I found a job at IBM working at first with standard equipment and then programming computers, which came relatively naturally to me, or at least was easy to do. I’m talking about the late 1960s, when computers were still very rare, even in business. At the time the computer was a 1401 with 8K characters of memory, actually 8,000 characters of memory because the 1401 was partly decimal. The Universidad de la Republica in Montevideo, was renting time from IBM at the time. I was working for IBM, but I was helping the people at the university to make good use of their computing time. I became very good friends with the people at the University who were doing computing and I was hired as an assistant. When the university decided to start a branch of engineering that would do computer science, or what was perceived to be computer science, I was there. I was sort of employee number one for computer science. HAIGH: So when you say you were working for IBM, were you working on their behalf at the university or with a computer that was located at the IBM office? GONNET: Actually both are true. At first I was just an employee of IBM. As a matter of fact I was called a spy in the local jargon, because when people would come and rent time from IBM, IBM wanted to make sure that they were using the equipment properly at that they would sign the time sheets and that they will not create havoc, and also to help the users a little bit to get good use of their time. That was my role when the university people were coming, to help and to monitor them and to make sure they were using the machine properly. But later as the relation with the university people developed, I eventually became an employee of the university. HAIGH: So would you say that your primary and secondary education had given you a good grounding in science and mathematics before you went to the university? GONNET: Yes.
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