I and my four brothers attended high school at Lisgar Collegiate Institute, which 1993 celebrated its 150th anniversary, making it one of the oldest educational institutions in Canada, and certainly the oldest and most venerable in the Ottawa area.
Note that Lisgar was a fairly early web adopter; they had a Linux box, the LCINet Web Server; unfortunately it crashed and "died."
lisgar.net - the web site of the Lisgar Collegiate Institute Alumni Association
Historical Summary of Canadian IMO team results - Lisgar placed...
I received my Bachelor of Mathematics degree from the Faculty of Mathematics of
the University of Waterloo (Joint Honours
Co-op Chartered Accountancy Studies with Computer Science) in 1990. I
was rather involved with the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club,
During my time in the UW Co-op program, I was employed by three public accounting firms in the Ottawa area (Price Waterhouse, Connelly, Koshy and Frouin, Cogan+Partners) as a student in accounts, preparing many sets of tax returns and financial statements. I became a highly skilled "spreadsheet jockey" in the process. While I continue to have some interest in financial matters in general, I certainly do not wish to be an accountant, and particularly not an auditor.
I also inherited interests in computer science while at UW, with special curiosity about such things as relational databases, text databases, the Unix operating system, Internet technologies, and data encryption, all of which are areas where significant amounts of work have taken place at Waterloo. Surprisingly, while I did take courses in the Combinatorics and Optimization department, I did not have too much connection to Operations Research, which is an area in which UW is fairly active.
See also UW Alumni
I received my M.Sc from University of Ottawa (Master of Science in Systems Science) in 1993. The University of Ottawa Systems Science Program is a multi-disciplinary program involving departments of:
Administration (Management Science group)
Computer Science
Economics
Electrical Engineering
Mathematics
My master's thesis was entitled Using Interior Point Methods to Solve the Multicommodity Network Flow Problem, supervised by Professor Jean-Michel Thizy of the Department of Management Science. One of these days, I may get around to putting the thesis online. An official copy is in the National Archives of Canada in Ottawa.
During my time at University of Ottawa, I served on the Council, Board of Directors, and, briefly, the Executive of GSAED (Grad Students Association), during a rather wild-and-woolly period in the organization's history when they went thru a lot of executive members.
My bit of wisdom out of my GSAED experiences is that Not-For-Profit enterprises should not try to run businesses; it can cause grave organizational problems if any officers involved are not competent at running businesses. The fact that there are significantly differing goals within the overall enterprise hinders the missions of both, to the detriment of all.
Rather more related to my studies in operations research, I was the founding president of the Ottawa Student Chapter of the Canadian Operational Research Society. This CORS chapter unfortunately appears to be inactive of late. I did some research work in Finance Theory on option pricing; unfortunately this mostly amounted to just cleaning up old FORTRAN code that tried to validate a alternative formulation to the common Black Scholes option pricing formulae that took account of the fact that prices jump up/down by discrete "ticks" rather than varying continuously. No original work on my part, regrettably...