University of Waterloo

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Image:Waterloo crest.png

UW Coat of Arms

Motto: Concordia cum veritate
(Latin: In harmony with truth)
Chancellor Mike Lazaridis
President David Lloyd Johnston
School type Public
Religious affiliation Main campus: None

Conrad Grebel: Mennonite
Renison: Anglican
St. Jerome's: Catholic
St. Paul's: United

Founded 1957
Location Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Enrollment 22,241 undergraduate
2,666 graduate
(2004)
Campus surroundings Urban, suburban
Campus size 4 km² (1000 acres)
Sports teams Warriors
Endowment $69 million
Colours Gold, black, and white

The University of Waterloo, also known as "UW" or simply "Waterloo", is a medium-sized research-intensive public university in the city of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The enrollment for 2004 was 22,241 undergraduate and 2,666 graduate students, with 818 full-time faculty members and 2008 staff. The University was founded in 1957.

The University of Waterloo is famous for being the groundbreaking proponent of co-operative education in Canada and currently maintains the largest such program in the world. Waterloo is also well known for strong programs in engineering, mathematics, and computer science.

Contents

History and profile

The University of Waterloo was originally conceived in 1955 as the Waterloo College Associate Faculties (WCAF), a semi-autonomous entity within Waterloo College (now Wilfrid Laurier University). Its first classes began in 1957, and two years later it became the University of Waterloo. From its relatively recent and humble origin, UW has come to the forefront of research in Canada. The University of Waterloo now attracts many bright students from across Canada and is widely recognized as one of Canada's premier universities. It is also known for its longstanding undergraduate distance education programs.

Waterloo is famous for being the groundbreaking proponent of co-operative education in Canada and currently maintains the largest such program in the world. Due to this, Waterloo has established strong ties with many major corporations in North America. In the annual Maclean's Magazine university rankings, Waterloo consistently scores within the top three positions in its Comprehensive category (research-intensive institutions with a wide range of undergraduate and graduate programs without medical schools). Waterloo has placed first overall in the reputational survey component of the university rankings for the years (1992-2002) and (2004-2005).

The University has faculties of Applied Health Sciences, Arts, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Independent Studies, Mathematics, and Science as well as an on-campus school of Optometry. There are also four federated university colleges with religious affiliations on campus: St. Jerome's University (Roman Catholic), Renison College (Anglican), St. Paul's United College (United Church of Canada), and Conrad Grebel University College (Mennonite).

The University is known for its esteemed programs in engineering, mathematics and computer science. It is the home of the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research and the Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computing. Additionally, the prowess of its students in academic competitions such as the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition and the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest has greatly contributed to the University's reputation in the last few decades.

Ties with Industry

Through its large co-op program and many spin-off companies, the University maintains very close ties with the high-tech industry. The University has a very researcher centric intellectual property policy [1] which has created many spin-off companies that maintain a good relationship with the University.

The University came under criticism in August of 2002 when the Faculty of Engineering accepted funding from Microsoft to develop courses using Microsoft's .Net platform. [2]

On Thursday, October 13th, 2005, Bill Gates paid a visit to UW, the only Canadian stop in his North American university tour. Students actually had to write in why they wanted to see Bill Gates, and the best responses were awarded tickets to see Gates live in person. Gates also mentioned, among other things, that "Most years, we hire more students out of Waterloo than any university in the world, typically 50 or even more.". National and international media covered this story, and it was a very big event for the University. In his visit, he talked about the upcoming challenges Microsoft and the tech sector as a whole face, and his vision for where he sees technology going in the future. Gates also gave a preview of X-Box 360, the video game console to be released soon by Microsoft in Winter 2005. He also demonstrated other projects under development, including Microsoft Office 12.

Spin-offs

Several companies have roots in, or have been spun off from the university. They include:

  • Maplesoft - flagship product, Waterloo Maple was developed as an advanced research project at the university.
  • Open Text Corporation - enterprise content management company spun-off from The New Oxford English Dictionary Project which developed a computer search for the dictionary
  • Watcom - former makers of a well-known C compiler, which has since been been open-sourced as OpenWatcom. Watcom subsequently merged with Powersoft, which subsequently was acquired by Sybase. The original Watcom organization has emerged again as the IAnywhere wholly-owned subsidiary of Sybase.
  • Research In Motion - makers of the BlackBerry
  • QNX - makers of the RTOS of the same name (with origins in the undergraduate Real Time Programming course.)
  • Certicom - a security company specialising in elliptic curve cryptography
  • SlipStream Data - makers of content acceleration solutions

Future plans

The University of Waterloo School of Architecture was relocated to downtown Cambridge, Ontario in September of 2004. This will give the School of Architecture more space to develop, and could bolster the economy of the Cambridge downtown area.

The University of Waterloo Research and Technology Park is currently under construction on the University's north campus. The park is intended to house many of the high-tech industries in the area and maintain the partnership between university and private-sector innovation. iAnywhere Solutions, a subsidiary of Sybase, is currently the only tenant, but two more construction projects are underway in the park.

The University and the City of Kitchener are currently in the process of constructing a health sciences campus, including a School of Pharmacy, in the central Kitchener warehouse district. An architect, Robbie/Young + Wright Architects & Hariri Pontarini Architects, has been chosen. The project will cost $34 million for the first phase.

The University of Waterloo's Department of Systems Design Engineering recently announced its intention to have a new building exclusively for the department and its students by 2007. With support from the program's alumni, fundraising work began in 2004. The building is envisioned to change the way engineering design is taught. For example, it is planned to provide students with reconfigurable design workspaces and other features. In the past, innovations introduced by Systems Design are known to be eventually adopted by other engineering design departments, such as the integral first year design project component that was implemented decades ago.

With donations by alumni and matching contributions from government, the University announced in April 2004 the founding of the Institute for Quantum Computing. [3]

Construction will soon begin on a $70 million building to house the Institute for Quantum Computing as well as the new Nanotechnology program.

The University is currently developing an enrichment program for high school students. This program, scheduled to start in Fall 2005, has been named "Waterloo Unlimited." [4]

The University is currently constructing a $3.5 million building to house 2,000 networked computers, for use in the SHARCNET (Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing Network) supercluster. The building will also act as a link between the Physics building and the Engineering complex, and as extra office space and computing facilities for the Physics and Engineering faculties. [5]

Records

On September 16th, 2004, the University of Waterloo's solar car team broke the Guinness World Record for the longest journey by a solar powered car. The solar car, called the Midnight Sun VII, broke the official record of 7,043.5 km (held by Queen's University) and the unofficial record of 13,054 km (held by Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia) after undertaking a 40-day tour of Canada and the United States, travelling a total of 15,079 km. The tour took the solar car through 7 provinces and 15 states.

Image:WaterlooMathBuilding.jpg
Math and Computer Science building.

Facts and figures

  • UW was the first university in the world to establish a Faculty of Mathematics.
  • UW's Faculty of Mathematics is the world's largest faculty in the mathematical, statistical, and computer sciences.
  • UW accounts for more than $1.6 billion of economic activity (1999) in Ontario.
  • Annually, UW attracts about 400,000 visitors from outside the region.
  • The university is represented in Canadian Interuniversity Sport by the Waterloo Warriors.

Famous alumni and faculty

Presidents and Chancellors

Presidents

Chancellors

Traditions and peculiarities

  • A unique species of tree is donated by each graduating class and planted on Alumni Lane.
  • According to urban legend, the Davis Centre is designed to look like a microchip in an aerial view of the building.
  • The Math & Computer building is designed to look like a giant slide rule when viewed from the side.
  • Students in the Faculty of Science receive safety goggles during orientation week.
  • Students in the Faculty of Engineering receive a yellow hard hat during orientation week.
  • Students in the Faculty of Mathematics receive a pink tie during orientation week, which is recognized as the unofficial symbol for math students. The story of where the pink tie originated can be found at the official Legend of the Pink Tie UW page.
  • Students in the Software Engineering program, run jointly by the Faculties of Engineering and Mathematics, receive both a yellow hard hat and pink tie.
  • The unofficial mascot for the Faculty of Math is a 40 feet long and 11 feet wide pink tie. The current tie is the third iteration of the original tie, it was purchased in 1989 but urban legend has it that should this tie be lost or damaged, it will not be replaced. The first tie was tie-napped in 1984 by the TLO (or Tie Liberation Organization, and the second tie was attacked by Engineers in 1986. Thus, the Tie Guard was formed in September 1994 by Marco Koechli. During orientation week in September, the guards set up tents and camp outside the MC building where the giant tie hangs. The Tie Guard station also acts as a 24 hour first aid station during Frosh Week.
  • The more official mascot for the Faculty of Math is the Natural Log (see natural log), which is a wooden log about two feet long, and is showcased on the 3rd floor of the Math and Computer building (MC).
  • The mascot for the Faculty of Engineering is a 60" pipe wrench called The Tool, formerly The RIDGID Tool, as it was donated by the Ridge Tool Company in 1968.
  • The mascot for the Faculty of Arts is a statue of a boar which was donated to the University of Waterloo Math Faculty in 1978, and in turn donated to the Arts Faculty. It is one of five copies of Italian sculptor Pietro Tacca's (1577-1640) locally known "Il Porcellino" statue. The other four copies of the boar are located in Sydney, Australia; California; Florence; and in Butchart Gardens, Victoria, B.C. More information about the boar can be found at Celebrating The Boar on the University Library's website. Students believe that rubbing the Boar's nose brings luck.
  • Student life converges upon the popular Student Life Centre, which has food, lounge, study and activities spaces and other services for students. Located in the Student Life Centre's Great Hall, the Turnkey Desk has been operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a year almost continuously since the opening of the Student Life Centre (then the Campus Centre) in 1968. Turnkeys are students who know just about everything there is to know about what's going on around campus and in the community, and help students as well as provide coffee, transit tickets, and other services. Turnkeys are so-named because they are the keepers of the keys for the many rooms in the Student Life Centre, and share their name with ancient jailers.
  • According to campus legend, during the Cold War, UW was a target for Soviet ICBMs, due to the presence of one of the most powerful computers then in existence. Furthermore, according to this legend, the Math and Computers building (which housed the computer) was designed to collapse outwards in the event of nuclear attack, rather than inwards, so as to protect the computer. This legend has resulted in the names of the on-campus bar The Bombshelter Pub, and a restaurant called Ground Zero (which has since gone out of business), both located in Students Life Centre which is next to the Math and Computers building.

See also

External links

Template:Ont Unide:Universität von Waterloo es:Universidad de Waterloo fr:Université de Waterloo ja:ワーテルロー大学 pt:Universidade de Waterloo

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