Munro has held numerous administrative positions at Waterloo, including director of the Institute for Computer Research, associate chair of undergraduate studies, and associate chair of graduate studies. He also served on the board of CEMC.
Over his career, Munro has made many fundamental and lasting contributions in sorting, selection and data structures, including optimal binary search trees, heaps and hashing. He stayed focused on these subjects, taking an expansive view, which included text search and data streams at a time when few others were exploring these areas.
“My first research interest was in data structures — in other words, the problem of organizing data so that the necessary operation can be performed efficiently — but I drifted into perceptrons, which are a forerunner of neural networks, and into arithmetic computation,” he said. “Later on, especially after I came to Waterloo, my focus moved back to data structures.”
“In the last half of the eighties and into the nineties I became involved in a project, led by Gaston Gonnet and Frank Tompa, to develop techniques and software to computerize the Oxford English Dictionary, a project that ultimately led to the creation of OpenText Corporation.”
Read more about this exceptional academic and Waterloo legend in the feature article.