2019 Prime of Life Achievement Award

When he joined the new Department of Computational Science in 1969, Professor Emeritus Winfried Grassmann, an economist, turned his PhD training and interest to this new technology. Although the department had a strong vision for research, the need to graduate students to meet the computing needs of large corporate and government organizations forced the faculty to teach in every area of the program, often outside their areas of expertise.

Professor Grassmann taught a heavy load proudly and cheerfully, not only of classes in his core areas of Operations Research and Simulation but also of first-year, computer hardware, and logic classes. Although research funding was scarce, as a scholar at heart he made foundational contributions to the idea of randomization, now a core idea in computational probability that appears in textbooks on the subject.

He was named a pioneer of Canadian Computer Science by the IBM Center for Advanced Studies in 2005, a distinction held by only a few. He has authored three textbooks and more than sixty peer-reviewed publications, which have received thousands of citations on Google Scholar. Since his retirement in 2006 he has continuously carried on research, published papers and supervised graduate students. He has held an NSERC (Tri-Council) Grant until age 80. He is appreciated by his colleagues and known for his fairness by the generations of students he has inspired.