[3] In 1965, when Mathematics was still a department within the Faculty of Arts, four third-year mathematics students (Richard Shirley, Angus German, James G. Mitchell, and Bob Zarnke) wrote the WATFOR compiler for the FORTRAN programming language, under the direction of lecturer Peter Shantz.
"Within a year it would be adopted by computing centres in over eight countries, and the number of student users at UW increased to over 2500."
Later on in 1966, two mathematics lecturers (Paul Dirksen and Paul H. Cress) led a team that developed WATFOR 360, for which they received the 1972 Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery.
As a result, the Department of Applied Analysis and Computer Science (AA&CS) was created.
Also that year, the Ontario government announced plans to build the Davis Centre, current home of the School of Computer Science.