Funny... it was the place for math and CS (in both the math and engineering schools) in the '70s. Hell, you'd have to have been blind to miss the Waterloo-sponsored math contests in high school (only the Society of Actuaries sponsored any other HS contests in those days, and that one was only for Grade 13 students in Ontario). If you did math or wanted to get into the computer world, you wanted to go to Waterloo, the same way that engineers wanted to go to Queens. I find it rather hard to believe that UW fell off of the map in the intervening period.