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Gaston Gonnet

JacquesC 2396
February 12 2008
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As many here know, Gaston Gonnet is a co-founder of Maple.  SIAM, in its History of Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing project, has now published a very long interview with Gaston.  For those who like a good yarn, as well as details of the history of Maple and Maplesoft, it makes for fascinating reading.

My favourite quotes are:

By and large, for most people input is still ASCII. For the output, you don’t want it to be ASCII. I would say that if you are an unsophisticated user, you may want to use the input with standard math. But if you really want to use the input many times you will hate the slowness of using the mouse in a graphical input. You really want to type in things, in ASCII.

and

In Canada, professors are liabilities; in Switzerland, professors are assets.

If you have the time (it is over 80 pages long!), have a read, it really is quite fun.
graph input

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