On October 31, 2014, Distinguished Professor Emeritus Ron Mullin (pictured on the left with Professor Dan Younger) delivered a lecture "A set-theoretic approach to fractional iterates" in the department's weekly Tutte seminar. Ron presented a new result that answered a question that Bill Tutte has posed to him in 1964.
Ron has had a long association with the Combinatorics and Optimization (C&O) Department and the University of Waterloo. He was the very first person to receive a degree from the University of Waterloo - he received an MA in Mathematics at the University of Waterloo's first convocation ceremony in 1960. The other students who received degrees during that ceremony were Kimmo Innanen, John Lawson, Peter Roe, Kestutis Salkauskas, Frank Schaffer, Thomas Troughton, and Ian Yamanaka, all of whom received MSc degrees in Applied Mathematics. In 1964, Ron completed his PhD thesis, entitled "An Enumerative Survey of Triangular Maps", under the supervision of Professor Bill Tutte.
After completing his PhD, Ron started an assistant professorship in the Faculty of Mathematics at Waterloo. He was a founding member of the C&O department in 1967. Together with Ralph Stanton, he established a leadership role in combinatorial design theory. He served as C&O department chair from 1975 to 1978. Later, he co-founded the Data Encryption Group, co-founded (with Gord Agnew and Scott Vanstone) the company Certicom Corporation which pioneered the development and deployment of elliptic curve cryptography, and was a founding editor of the journal Designs, Codes and Cryptography. He supervised 19 PhD students during his career at Waterloo. Ron retired from the University of Waterloo in 1996.