William F. (Bill) Smyth                


Welcome to my home page!
You are Visitor No. 116566 since 1 December 2001.


Regarded at its birth in 2007 as a one-off event, StringMasters seems to be here to stay. Since 2007 it has been held at least once every year at a large variety of places: Perth, Western Australia; Stellenbosch, South Africa; Palermo & Verona, Italy; Prague, Czech Republic; Rouen, France; Warsaw, Poland; and several times more at McMaster University. In 2015 for the first time it was sponsored by the Centre for Combinatorics on Words & Applications (CCWA) of Murdoch University, Western Australia.

Papers emerging from StringMasters 2007 & 2008 were published in a special issue 97-3 (2009) of Fundamenta Informaticae. Papers coming out of the 2009-2011 StringMasters meetings appeared in Journal of Discrete Algorithms 10 (2012) and JDA 20 (2013); a special issue of the latter journal also published papers from the 2012-2013 meetings.

Please take note that the International Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms held its 2017 meeting 17-21 July in Newcastle, Australia, to commemorate Mirka Miller, one of the founders of IWOCA, my old friend and colleague, who passed away in January 2016.

In 2020, the year of the pandemic, IWOCA, under the supervision of Ralf Klasing, went on-line, one of the first scientific gatherings to do so.

In 2022, StringMasters was hosted by IWOCA 2022 at the University of Trier, co-chaired by Cristina Bazgan and Henning Fernau.

News!
In 2016 (a long time ago now), to mark my 80th birthday, Theoretical Computer Science published a special issue on Stringology.

Current Status
Emeritus Professor, Algorithms Research Group, Department of Computing & Software (C&S), McMaster University
Professor, School of Computational Science & Engineering, McMaster University

Office
Art Bourne Building Extension ABB-C535

Mobile
1-905-523-7568

Electronic Mail
smyth``AT''mcmaster``FULL STOP''ca
Education
1990 Curtin University of Technology, Ph.D. (Computing Science)
1983 University of Ottawa, M.Sc. (Applied Mathematics)
1957 University of Toronto, B.A. (Pure Mathematics)

Areas of Interest (see C&S Algorithms Research Group)
Combinatorial Algorithms, Especially Algorithms on Strings
Graph Theory & Its Applications
Applications to Bioinformatics
Various Social/Cultural Issues

Membership in Professional Organizations
1966 Association for Computing Machinery
1966 American Mathematical Society
1966 Society for Industrial & Applied Mathematics
1974 Mathematical Association of America
1983 British Computer Society (Fellow)
1987 Combinatorial Mathematics Society of Australasia
1989 European Association for Theoretical Computer Science
1990 Institute of Combinatorics & Its Applications
1990 Engineering Council (Chartered Engineer)
2006 International Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms (Steering Committee Member, resigned 2020)
2007 StringMasters (Founder)
2009 Mathematical Reviews (Reviewer)
2012 Mitacs College of Reviewers

Membership in Other Organizations
1986 Mosman Park Tennis Club
1995 Society for Academic Freedom & Scholarship
2001 Rosedale Tennis Club
2011 Never Again Group

Experience
Current Teaching & Supervision
Refereed Publications
Selected Publications
Can We Compute Runs Efficiently? -- a lecture (September 2014) on recent combinatorial results
Are Three Squares Impossible? -- three lectures (May 2012) on overlapping squares
Simon's Collection of Test Strings
Sarah Banyassady: Code for Approximate Repeats using Multiple Spaced Seeds
Family

Open Letter to the Editor, MAA Focus
Last revised: Tuesday, 28-Jun-2022 17:03:05 EDT