He received a Bachelor of Science in physics in 1942, a Master of Arts in 1944 and a Ph.D. in 1947 from the University of Toronto.
In 1964, he helped to found the first Canadian graduate department of computer science at the University of Toronto.
In 1958, he helped to found the Canadian Information Processing Society and was its president from 1960 to 1961.
[1][2] In 1994, he received the International Federation for Information Processing Isaac L. Auerbach Award and was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
He was married to Phyllis Bloom, a Canadian science fiction novelist and poet, from 1949 until her death in 2009.