Why should you study Information Retrieval?
Because one day, they might name a street after you!
Tim could probably tell you more about Frank Tompa than I can, having worked with him on the New OED project. I knew him as an undergraduate and graduate student at Waterloo.
I still remember being blown away by a talk that he gave when I was at University of Toronto about indexing using semi-infinite strings and especially his description of the PAT search engine and the LECTOR text display system (which, if memory serves, included a lot of the ideas that we take for granted now with XML and XSLT).
Congratulations, Frank!
