Obituary for Mihai Patrascu

Mihai Patrascu, aged 29, passed away on Tuesday June 5, 2012, after a 1.5 year battle with brain cancer. Mihai's carreer was short but explosive, full of rich and beautiful ideas as witnessed, e.g., in his 20 STOC/FOCS papers.

Mihai was very happy about being co-winner of the 2012 EATCS Presburger Young Scientist Award for his ground-breaking work on data structure lower-bounds. It was wonderful that the community stood up to applaud this achievement at STOC'12. Unfortunately he will not make it to the award ceremony on July 10 at ICALP. Mihai's appreciation for the award shows in the last post on his blog http://infoweekly.blogspot.com/.

I was fortunate enough to be one of Mihai's main collaborators. One of the things that made it possible to work on hard problems was having lots of fun: playing squash, going on long hikes, and having beers celebrating every potentially useful idea.

On this last note, Mihai's wife Mira tells me that she does not want any flowers and that his funeral will be back in Romania. However, she wants people to have a glass of wine in Mihai's memory, thinking about him as the inspired and fun young man that he was.

Mikkel Thorup