[TUHS] Michael O Rabin has died

[Dan Cross via TUHS]

I just heard that Michael O Rabin passed away a few days ago, on April 14th.

In addition to producing a number of advances in cryptography and
computability, he shared the 1976 ACM Turing Award with Dana S Scott
for their joint paper titled, "Finite Automata and Their Decision
Problems", that introduced non-deterministic finite automata.  These
machines are, of course, familiar to TUHS and COFF readers because of
their applications to practical software implementations of pattern
matching with regular expressions.

I was fortunate to be able to take his introductory cryptography
course during one of the semesters when he taught it at Columbia[*].
It was an amazing experience: for someone so eminent, he was a
phenomenal instructor who was clearly animated by the joy of teaching.
One presumes he didn't have to teach that course, but he wanted to,
and rather obviously enjoyed doing so.

Condolences to his friends and family, and, as I believe it is
customary to say in Judaism, may his memory be a blessing.

        - Dan C.

[*] Rabin's daughter, Tal Rabin, is herself a respected computer
scientist and is at IBM TJ Watson in Yorktown Heights; her father
would venture down to New York City for a semester here and there,
teach at Columbia, and spend time with his grand children, who he
would occasionally mention in class: I remember a discussion of some
primitive that would be resilient to data loss, and he mentioned
"grandchildren stuffing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches into
computers" as a concrete example of such loss: it was unclear whether
he meant it literally.