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Memorial Book
Message by Ron Pinter
On May 4th the Annual Rothschild Lecture was delivered
by Andy Yao at Haifa University.
Before the lecture, Alon Itai (one of Shimon's first PhD students
and the current Dean of the CS Dept at the Techion)
said a few words about Shimon.
In addition, Marty Golumbic (who presided over the event),
Noga Alon (who introduced Andy), and Andy himself,
expressed their own grief, followed by a moment of silence by the audience.
Message by Amir Pnueli
I think it is important to mention at this point
that, in addition to all the other multiple tributes and praises,
Shimon was also responsible for starting the Computer Science teaching
program at the Weizmann Institute and being its head and major inspiration
for the seminal period of its inception.
A Story by Sheila Greibach
I still have happy memories of the long ago time as a fellow grad
student with Shimon (we received the Phd in the same year) in the
TA bullpen at Harvard. Since I didn't rate a desk, Shimon was kind
enough to give me storage space in his and help liberate a typing table
for me and make me feel welcome though the only woman there.
I still remember the games of give-away chess that helped relieve
grad student stress. Shimon helped me to my first published theorem
(the undecidability of ambiguity for minimal linear grammars) by
knocking down my first "proof" of decidability - then I went back
to my apartment, stayed up all night, and came up with the
undecidability proof which could withstand the Even test!
Later, I had the honor of co-authoring a paper with him (with
the late Ron Book and G Ott).
The First Time I Met Shimon [by Sergio Rajsbaum]
The first time I met Shimon personally was around October 1987.
I went to talk with him when I was a Masters student
at the Technion looking for a thesis subject. I was not aware
of the tremendous prestige and strong image he had at the Technion;
people used to think he advised only "geniuses"
(and at the Technion people understand through examples of
world class famous leaders that this word has a *very* strong meaning),
and many even feared him. Simply, I knew he was probably the best
teacher of the Department of Computer Science, that he had written
a classic textbook on Graph Algorithms, and that I liked
his research interests. So very innocently I knocked on his door,
and said "hi" with a smile. He welcomed me warmly, also with a smile,
and for a long time told me some of his wonderful stories about
famous computer scientists. He was interested to know I had recently
arrived to Israel from Mexico, and told me some more stories about
the old days of the country's history; he loved Israel and always
wanted me to stay there for good. He told me that I had to choose between
one of his two current interests: Crypto and Distributed Computing.
I chose the later, heard some more funny stories about
his former student Baruch Awerbuch, and I left the room motivated
and eager to start reading Baruch's paper he suggested to present
him the following week ("Complexity of network synchronization").
For a young masters student this meeting was an unforgettable experience.
Later on, I was getting admiration comments from students and even
secretaries- "wow, he accepted you as a student?!" and so on. When I
switched to continue working on the same subject with him towards a PhD
(at the Technion there is a "direct path" option to do this switch),
still somewhat innocently, I literally became the "hero" of some of these
people (and realized how far away from looking like a "genius" I looked).
When I first met him I had no clue that this was his image, and it surprised
people to learn that he knew nothing about me, except that I had taken
his Crypto course and not excelled, and yet received me so warmly. I feel
my friendship with him started that very first meeting. I am very grateful
to Shimon; he is one of the people that have most influenced my life
personally and professionally. It is due to his views and attitudes
about science, and through his encouragement and trust
that I took an academic research carrier.
Sergio Rajsbaum
Mexico City, UNAM
May 10, 2004
Some thoughts and a story [by Oded Goldreich]
Sergio's story illustrates many of the characteristics of Shimon,
which people close to him take for granted but others may totally miss.
In particular, it is a pity that people felt timid to approach him,
but this was certainly not his fault; it was not his fault that he
was so impressive. Like a Greek God, not perfect and yet immense.
Sergio's story made me go back to my very first memories of Shimon.
The first are from his legendary Graph Algorithms class.
I vividly recall my admiration to his style of presenting material;
always focusing on the key ideas and on the underlying intuition.
I was even more amazed by his never-failing ability to "hit the point"
every time he answered our questions (i.e., he would always understand
what is actually underlying our confusion or doubt and respond to it).
He seemed to me the personification of wisdom, indeed god-like.
Needless to say, the thought of being his student had never
crossed my mind.
Half a year later, in the summer vacation after my 2nd undergraduate year,
I was traveling in Europe. I was in London, it was almost 11PM, and the
last Tube was about to leave the center of the city. I ran through the entire
station and entered the wagon with the doors slamming behind me. I almost
fell on a distinguish Lord who was sitting across the door. After a moment,
I told myself "strange, this majestic Lord looks like Professor Even"
and then we recognized each other. It turned out that we were heading to
the same station, and then to the same hotel. So Shimon and Tamar
invited me to their room for a midnight cup of tea. There was a nice
conversation, but this was not the beginning of a wonderful friendship.
He was very friendly and I did notice this fact, but this did not make
me feel comfortable with him. How could I have been comfortable with
somebody I viewed as a Greek God.
Our ways crossed again only a year later. I was selected to be his TA
in that legendary course, and somehow I became his graduate student.
One thing just led to another, or maybe it was only my perception and
he had it all planned. In any case, in spite of all his efforts, I could
never rid myself from the feeling that I was dealing with a (Greek) God.
Throughout all the years that followed, I loved him and I knew he loved me,
but I had to force myself to call him "Shimon" -- even calling his attention
(without calling him by any name) felt too daring.
This is my story. It probably sound weird and says more about me than
about him. But still, I believe that it explains the big paradox of
how come that a warm and open person like Shimon may induce such "fear"
(where by "fear" I mean the Hebrew word used in "fear of god",
a term that is a hybrid of "fear" and "deep respect" and "love").
An anonymous story
It was in Berkeley, probably in the summer of 1980.
I saw Shimon Even walking on the edge of the sidewalk.
He was concentrated on keeping his balance on the edge
and was smiling to himself. I thought to myself: I like this guy!
Message by Uzi Vishkin
I have written the attached note for Shimon Even's retirement party
last year. I will miss him very much.
Dear Shimon,
Here is my story on how your inspiration actually made a significant
difference in my life.
As an 11th grader high-school student, I took a pre-combinatorial-algorithmics
class with about 20 others high schools students from the center
region of Israel with you.
The course met once a week at the Weizmann Institute.
I later proceeded to get my BSc and MSc in Math from the Hebrew University
which followed by military service and then doctoral studies at the
Technion in Computer Science.
Your influence in that early course was pivotal for my decision to pursue
a computer science degree in general and at the Technion, in particular.
I distinctly remember how towards the middle of a PDE graduate class at the
Hebrew University I raised my hand and asked the Math professor when we will
start solving equations as opposed to just proving theorems on the existence
of solutions and their uniqueness.
He immediately looked down on me and responded without hesitation:
engineers solve, mathematician don't!
As I reflected later on this answer, which looked to me very significant then
since I was told by everybody what a big name this professor had,
I remembered that 4-5 years earlier the first person who taught me that not
only solutions but even algorithms are Kosher was you.
This ended up guiding me to chose Computer Science and go to the Technion.
I was honored to become in 1981 one of your first academic grandchildren, as
Yossi Shiloach was my doctoral advisor, and later produce one of your first
academic grandchildren in 1986 (Gadi Landau, followed by Baruch Schieber, Omer
Berkman, Yossi Matias, and Cenk Sahinalp), and rely on them to produce yet
another generation.
I am deeply indebted to you for the difference you have made in my life.
Uzi Vishkin
Message by Rafail Ostrovsky
Shimon Even made a strong influence on my scientific life and my approach
and love of science. Every time I visited Israel, I would meet with Shimon
and be warmly greeted and hear a kaleidoscope of wonderful stories about not
just science, but the personalities involved, always told with great love
for people, for science and for life is general. One example comes to mind
especially vividly: Shimon told me how, many years ago, he was lecturing in
Italy on algorithms and discovered a young Italian student in his class who
asked all the right questions and was amazingly fast. Shimon told me how he
called Manuel Blum and urged him to accept this brilliant young student into
Berkeley Ph.D. program. That young student-- it turned out-- is my own Ph.D.
advisor - Silvio Micali. In recent years Shimon encouraged me to move to
academia, as always with a story how he worked in industry and what
happened, and was delighted to hear about my recent move. We lost not only
a great scientist but a wonderful, funny, genuine person, and I lost a
friend and a mentor.
A Story by Alan Selman
The first time I interacted with Shimon Even was in December of 1980
when I wrote to him about some reports that he and Yacov Yacobi had written.
I had some technical questions and comments. Also, I asked whether I
might be able to spend a sabbatical year at the Technion.
Shimon wrote back that "we will be happy to have you here,"
and within two months time, somehow, had arranged for a Fulbright
award to be available to support the stay for my family and me.
I never ceased to be astonished by this arrangement. We spent a
wonderful sabbatical year, which was not only enlightening and
productive for me, but was a great experience for my family as well.
Shimon was a great host, great help, and great friend during our stay.
Our research discussions were a joy, because Shimon had amazing intuition
about problems and a keen sense about what are the interesting questions.
We remained friends ever since. Although our research paths diverged
and we never worked together again, we corresponded regularly.
Over the years Shimon was my source for information about life
and current events in Israel.
A Story by Amir Herzberg
While all my undergrad and grad studies were in the Technion (EE/CS),
I was not lucky to learn under Shimon (which, Oded probably says,
explains some things).
However, Shimon also had a major influence on my professional development,
in several ways. I'll mention only the most critical of them,
that began while I was working on my MSc thesis, which dealt with
cryptographic protocols. It began when I found some attacks on his design
of electronic wallet (with Oded and Yacov). Shlomit Pinter, my advisor,
was a bit hesitant about these claims, and suggested I show them to Shimon.
I must have been trembling when approaching him on this matter, but Shimon
surprised me - he was really excited, interested and happy, although it
turns out he was aware already of these problems and had solutions similar
to mine; he also encouraged me to complete the work at least for the thesis
(which I did).
With all this encouragement, I was happy to hear Shimon will be one of
my MSc thesis readers. I was therefore quite disappointed to hear,
indirectly, later, that he was not very excited about it. I was further
disappointed that he didn't tell me.
At that point, considering Shimon as highly as I did,
I was considering giving up on research. But I decided that before I
give up, I must ask him directly what he thinks of my potential as a
researcher. Trembling even more than on my first visit, I came to his
office. And again Shimon turned the visit into a wonderful surprise.
Yes, he was not excited about the thesis. But he still thinks I can be a
good researcher - I just need much more demanding coaching (while he didn't
say so, I am quite sure he was really annoyed at some "theorems" I gave -
until that point, I didn't really take any theory classes, so you can guess
how that looked). He then went on and suggested maybe I should talk with Oded,
who just returned to the Technion. I certainly heard Oded is coming, but on
my own I certainly wouldn't dream of approaching him - with my lack of
knowledge of theory of computation... I also suspect Shimon encouraged Oded
to do his best to turn me from a hacker/engineer into a computer science
researcher - I'm not sure how successful this attempt was, but it was
definitely an experience...
Comment by Oded:
Shimon had great respect for good engineering,
and it would never have occurred to him to "convert" an engineer
into a theoretical researcher. I shared (and share) his attitude.
What we saw was a person with superb engineering skills
that was interested in pursuing theoretical research.
Such people are rare and we definitely wanted to assist them.
Message by Yonatan Stern
I was shocked to hear today from a Haim Gottesman that Prof. Shimon Even
died two weeks ago. He was my Masters degree advisor at the Technion in
1979-1981. I took several of his courses in undergrad and fell in love
with the subject of algorithms and developed tremendous respect to Shimon
himself. I was grateful when he agreed to become my advisor. He was an
inspiring teacher and a wonderful advisor, always open to my ideas yet quick
to point out weaknesses and incompleteness in my arguments. He influenced
my career in many ways and I stayed in touch with him for several years
after graduation while pursuing a career in industry. Even though I was not
in touch with Shimon for many years, the news of his death shocked me and I
feel that I lost a mentor and a friend.
Yonatan Stern, CEO
Eliyon Technologies Corp.
Cambridge MA
Some Thoughts by Wolfgang Paul
A great scientist with a great sense of humor has died.
We knew he was mortal. We feel a sense of loss,
even though his death does not affect our daily life at all.
Is the loss real or are we just being sentimental?
The following experiment was invented by psychologists:
you ask a person to draw a map of ALL streets, paths, places
and rooms they know.
What you get is the persons internal spatial model of the world.
It usually is amazingly small (except for taxi drivers).
All our memories and all our expectations live there.
This model is the sum of the life we lived so far.
It is very real; the so-called reality is just input for its construction.
And then,
by an immaterial string of letters transmitted by electronic mail,
we learn that we must adjust the model, make it smaller,
make it...less rich.
Shimon does not live there any more. I am not as rich as I used to be.
A Story by Boaz and Tami Tamir
For us Shimon was a combination of Guy's father and a great
lecturer/researcher, and we were able to enjoy both worlds. We remember
one visit at Guy's apartment in Ramat-aviv a few years ago. Shimon and
Tamar were also there. Tomer (Guy and Daria's son) tried to explain
the rules of the game 'Bul-Pgia' (master-mind) to our son Eran, they were
about 6 years old then. Shimon joined them and we enjoyed every minute
watching the private lesson our son is getting from 'Professor Even',
a real lesson of cryptography basics.
Message to Guy by Shay Kutten
I guess I should have been ready for these bad news, but I was still shocked.
Your father was the best lecturer I have ever heard.
He managed to transfer his love for the profession to his students,
including to me, and graph theory is still one of my favorites,
to a large degree thanks to him. I thought he was a very charismatic
person to whom my alma mater was and still is connected in my mind.
I deeply feel his departure.
I also feel pain I could not visit you on these sad days.
I hope you know my thoughts are still there.
A Story by Yacov Yacobi
I met Shimon in the mid 70s and was lucky, happy and proud when he agreed
to become my D.Sc. mentor. We usually met once a week and I fondly
remember those meetings as very challenging and full of fun
(Yardena, Shimon's secretary, said that she could always tell
when I was inside by the mutual bursts of laughter).
Shimon introduced me to Complexity Theory, and when he first drew
on the board "the map of the world as we know it" (= P, NP, etc.)
I was fascinated by the beauty and far-reaching power of this theory.
Shimon's wisdom, enthusiasm, appreciation, and humor were major
driving forces in my life in those remote bright years.
A Message by Gavriela Lev
I felt that Shimon was always there,
like a rock, with good advices for a former student.
The rock fell.
A story by Shlomi Fish
Several years ago, during my undergraduate studies of Electrical
Engineering at the Technion, I wondered how can one determine if
two graphs were equivalent and developed an algorithm for this task.
A friend of mine, who took a class by Shimon Even,
recommended that I consult him. I went to Shimon's office
and found him eager to listen to me and help me.
He found a flaw in my algorithm, told me of the history
of the problem and referred me to many useful facts.
He was also willing to meet with me again, some time later,
to evaluate a modified algorithm that I have developed.
It turned out that my algorithms resembled some known algorithm.
I'll always remember Shimon as a very nice and friendly man,
who was willing to help me and to share with me some of
his professional knowledge.
I was very sad to hear that he passed away.
A Message from Tal Rabin
On May 14th, a special NYC Theory Day took place at Columbia University.
Before the lectures, in his opening comments, Zvi Galil spoke of Shimon.
He mentioned his own personal debt to Shimon telling that Shimon and
Amir Pnueli are the ones who influenced him to go into Computer Science.
He said that he heard their lectures while being a third year
undergraduate student in Mathematics, and if it were not for these
lectures he would have probably be in Math.
Three of the other speakers also mentioned Shimon in their lectures.
Dick Karp said that Shimon was very instrumental in the development
and advancement of Computer Science in Israel, and in particular
by helping form two major departments at Weizmann and at the Technion.
He concluded by saying that Shimon will be greatly missed.
Shafi Goldwasser told a wonderful personal story about her first encounter
with Shimon. During the summer of 1980, when Shimon was visiting Berkeley,
he took the time to talk to her. He asked her what she working on and she
answered: Cryptography.
Without further ado in his direct fashion, Shimon proceeded to find out
what does she realy know about cryptography ... which was unfortunately
very little! As she left his office, there was only one way to save face:
figure out what is was about.
Peter Shor said that he got to know Shimon when Shimon was visiting
Bell Labs. Although he did not get to know Shimon very closely, from
what he knows it is clear that Shimon will be greatly missed.
A Tribute by Yefim Dinitz
Following is a transcript of Yefim's speech
at Shimon's retiring party (Nov. 2003).
Shimon had a very important influence on my life in the scientific
community. I'd like to tell you about three major impacts he had on
my professional life.
The first impact dates back to 1973, and was really crucial. You
may ask how a person in Israel could influence somebody in the past
USSR, when there was no possibility neither to go out from the
USSR, nor to publish at or even communicate with the West? In
order to clear this question up, let us begin from even more
"ancient" period, with the early history of computing and
algorithms in the USSR.
The following anecdote sheds some light on how things were done in
the USSR. Shortly after the wall fell in 1990, an American and a
Russian who had both worked on development of weapons meet. The
American asks: "When you developed the Bomb, how were you able to
perform such an enormous amount of computing with your weak
computers?". The Russian responses: "We used better algorithms."
This was really so. Russia had an old tradition of excellence in
Mathematics. Besides, there was a usual Soviet way of attacking
hard problems by combining authority pressure and peoples'
enthusiasm. When Stalin decided to develop the Bomb, many bright
mathematicians, in particular, Izrail Gelfand and my first Math
teacher, Alexander Kronrod, put aside their mathematical studies
and "dug" deeply in the novel computing area. They have
collected and created teams of talented people, and ... succeeded.
The teams continued to grow and work on theory and
practice of computing.
The supervisor of my Master thesis was George Adelson-Velsky
(nicknamed Gera), one of the fathers of Computer Science. Among
the other students in his group were M. Kronrod (one of the future
"Four Russians"), A. Karzanov (the future author of the O(n^3)
network flow algorithm), and other talented school pupils of
A. Kronrod. Then, in 1968, the Bomb project was over long ago.
As well, the work on the chess program Kaissa, created by members
of A. Kronrod's team, under the guidance of Adelson-Velsky, was
finished; Kaissa won the first world championship in 1969.
The new passion of Gera became discrete algorithms, which
he felt had a great future.
The fundamental contribution of Adelson-Velsky to Computer Science
was AVL-trees. He (AV) and Eugene Landis (L) published a paper
about AVL-trees in early 60's, consisting of just a few
pages. Besides solving an important problem, it presented a bright
approach to data structure maintenance. While this approach became
standard in the USSR, it was still not known in the West. No
reaction followed their publication during a couple of years, until
another paper, 15 pages long, was published by a researcher,
which understood how AVL-trees work and explained this to the
Western community, in its language. Since then, AVL-trees and the
entire data structure maintenance approach became a corner-stone of
Computer Science.
We, the students of Gera, absorbed the whole paradigm of the Soviet
computing school from his lectures. The eagerness to develop
economical algorithms, based on the deep investigation of the
problem and on using data structure maintenance and amortized
running time analysis as necessary components, constituted this
paradigm. All this became quite natural for us in 1968, 18 years
before the first publication in the West on amortized analysis, by
R. Tarjan. Hence, it was not surprising that my network flow
algorithm, invented in January 1969, improved the running time of
the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm based on using and maintaining a
layered network data structure, and on a delicate amortized
analysis of the running time.
Back then, such an approach was not surprising for us in the USSR,
but was very unusual in the West. Professor Shimon Even and his
talented Ph.D. student Alon Itai (which is present now as the host,
the CS Faculty Dean) were very curious and intrigued by the two new
network flow algorithms: mine and of Alexander Karzanov, in
1973. It was very difficult for them to decipher these two 4-page
papers (such was the page restriction of the prestigious journal
Doklady). However, as you the friends of Shimon are aware, Shimon
was not used to give up. After about three days long effort, Shimon
and Alon understood both papers, except for the layered network
maintenance issue. The gap was fixed by using the Karzanov's
concept of blocking flow (which was indirect, in my paper), and a
beautiful way of using DFS for finding each augmenting path.
As all of you know, Shimon is an excellent lecturer. During the
next couple of years, Shimon presented Dinic's algorithm in
lectures he gave in many leading research universities of the
West. The result was important, the idea was fresh, the algorithm
was very nice, combining both BFS for constructing the layered
network and DFS for operating it. The success was great, and
Dinic's algorithm achieved its place in annals of Computer Science
community. Almost nobody was aware that the algorithm, taught in
many universities since then, is not the original version, and that
a part of its beauty--combining BFS and DFS--was due to a
contribution of Shimon and Alon. But this is so, and I declare this
today.
The original algorithm published in a Soviet journal was not understood
by others in the West, as well. Shimon told me once that, in particular,
he has learned that Bob Tarjan had tried to reconstruct the
algorithm from my paper, but was not successful. After more than 20
years, I finally explained to Shimon the original version of my
paper. After that, Shimon though continued to teach his version of
my algorithm but used to add a remark like: "My friend Yefim Dinitz
invented this algorithm at the age of 19. In his paper on this
algorithm, he was first to publish an amortized running time
analysis as early as 1970!".
Now, you can see that the wide acquaintance with my algorithm in
the West was due to Shimon. Therefore, when I arrived in Israel,
many doors were open to me. However, not all of them: The academy
was cautious. During my last 15 years in Russia I worked in the
industry, and have published just a little. One can easily
understand the difficulty. The Technion was not eager to suggest a
tenure track position to me, as Shimon suggested.
I'd like to make a philosophical observation, now. No system is
able to maintain itself without a certain conservatism, without
rules taking care of its stability. One of the methods is counting
papers of a candidate before offering a position. Another criteria
is teaching experience - mine was fairly small. Such rules are very
hard to overcome, and this must be so. On the other side, there is
a place for miracles in our life, and there are people that bring
about such miracles. This essential aspect of life is crucial,
among other things, for innovations.
In my case, such a person was Shimon. It was already known that he
is able to do things that seem to be impossible. Also in my case,
the miracle occurred. Shimon has succeeded: I became an Associate
professor at the Technion, a really important achievement, in my
novice state. My friend, a faculty at the CS Dept. of the Technion,
expressed the fight at the Technion by the metaphor: "Shimon
threw chairs." I can imagine something like this, can you?
Shimon's third influence was that he taught me to teach. Once more,
you may be surprised how this could happen: I was neither a
Shimon's Ph.D. student, as many of you, nor ever registered to his
course. However, I really listened to the most of his Graph
Algorithms course. When? Why? What for?
When I began to teach at the Technion, I knew that I am able to
interest people when I present a subject close to me. However, I
could do this only without time pressure. However, as all of you
are aware, time is a scarce resource in university courses. As long
as I was teaching a compulsory course in parallel to Orna Grumberg,
my teaching went on not so bad. However, after a couple of years,
there was an external CS Dean who assigned me to teach Graph
Algorithms (a compulsory course) not only for the first time but
also alone. This became a catastrophe, though the material was not
new, for me, of course. Let me explain why.
As a result of my mathematical education, I always felt obliged to
clear up all the details in a proof. Otherwise, it would not be a
proof. Such proofs are sometimes even interesting, but I felt that
it is the ONLY way to present proofs. Most of you know well that
algorithm correctness proofs are not similar to Math Analysis
lemmas. They usually have beautiful basic ideas, but sometimes
their full proofs are heavy. In my course, I tried to teach
students to see all the details, and to process them
appropriately. I felt that a great aim would be achieved, by this,
for the listeners. Poor students ... . But I felt obliged!
Let us stop this particular story.
After this bad experience, I decided to listen to Shimon giving the
same course. I had in mind a few delicate points which I was very
eager to see in Shimon's presentation. Usually, when presenting
issues related to these points, Shimon simply went his other way,
and it was difficult to judge. However, once I had in mind a pure
gap, which was really hard to fill and impossible to
avoid. Imagine, I sit in the class, and feel that the moment is
approaching. Closer, very close. But there is almost no time for
it, up to the lecture end, what is it? Shimon comes to the critical
point, and ... he is already explaining the next detail. Shimon not
only did not give an explanation, he even did not mention the
difficulty. HIS PROOF WAS NOT FULL!
I could hardly imagine such a way of presentation. I walked around
with a storm in my soul for a couple of days. Eventually, I've
realized that ... Shimon is right. We have a bounded time in our
courses. Our courses contain important results and ideas, and they
are not easy. We must let students absorb what they are able to
absorb, and give them the feeling that they understand. By hiding
some gaps, we will achieve these aims, and this is for the good of
our students. In fact, just a few of our students will become
theoreticians, and those would have time to learn how to give a
full algorithm correctness proof during their grad studies.
Since then, I tried to follow Shimon's way of dealing with
difficult proofs. I feel that this was very useful, even
crucial, for my teaching ability.
To be honest, I did not follow all of Shimon's advises. One of them
was not to continue working on graph connectivity
structures. Shimon knew a few people who had started their careers
with strong results in this field, presenting their results in
conferences, have published almost no journal papers, and eventually
stopped publishing. I continued in this area as my main one.
One particular result that I am proud of is a 56 pages long
paper in SIAM Journal of Computing, in this area. Another result is
that the Technion decided not to give me a permanent position (that
paper was published after this decision).
However, I am in academy since then, now in the Ben-Gurion
University, and feel that this is my place. Thanks to Shimon, for
his many efforts in helping me.
Summarizing, I'd like to stress one of my above points. Our life
would be much more boring without miracles. Let us be happy that
they occur, sometimes, and be grateful to persons who bring them
about, and, in particular, to Shimon.
As you may be aware, after leaving his position at the Technion,
Shimon became a Vice-President of the Tel-Aviv Academic College.
Let us wish him to continue to be strong as usually, and have a
fruitful continuation of his academy activity.
Reproduced by Yefim [August 2004].
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