{"id":1059,"date":"2012-06-07T08:58:13","date_gmt":"2012-06-07T13:58:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=1059"},"modified":"2017-01-13T06:59:23","modified_gmt":"2017-01-13T11:59:23","slug":"mihai-patrascu-1982-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=1059","title":{"rendered":"Mihai P\u0103tra\u015fcu (1982-2012)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday brought the tragic news that <a href=\"http:\/\/people.csail.mit.edu\/mip\/\">Mihai P\u0103tra\u015fcu<\/a>&#8212;who revolutionized the field of data structures since he burst onto the scene a decade ago&#8212;has passed away at the age of 29, after a year-and-a-half-long battle with brain cancer.\u00a0 Mihai was not only an outstanding researcher but a fun-loving, larger-than-life personality in the computer science theory community.\u00a0 For more information, see <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.computationalcomplexity.org\/2012\/06\/mihai-patrascu-1982-2012.html\">Lance and Bill&#8217;s<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/mybiasedcoin.blogspot.com\/2012\/06\/sad-passing-mihai-patrascu.html\">Michael Mitzenmacher&#8217;s<\/a> blogs.<\/p>\n<p>Mihai was an MIT CS PhD student (advised by Erik Demaine), who worked on the same floor as me for the first couple years I was here.\u00a0 I&#8217;m still in shock over his loss&#8212;I hadn&#8217;t even known about the cancer before yesterday. \u00a0 Mihai and I had pretty big disagreements, mostly over the viability of quantum computing, the &#8220;technical&#8221; versus &#8220;conceptual&#8221; theory debate, various things he wrote on <a href=\"http:\/\/infoweekly.blogspot.com\/\">his blog<\/a> and various things I wrote on mine.\u00a0 But it seems terribly stupid now to have let this stuff get in the way of collegiality.\u00a0 I feel guilty for not trying to mend bridges with him when I had the chance.<\/p>\n<p>Rest in peace, Mihai.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday brought the tragic news that Mihai P\u0103tra\u015fcu&#8212;who revolutionized the field of data structures since he burst onto the scene a decade ago&#8212;has passed away at the age of 29, after a year-and-a-half-long battle with brain cancer.\u00a0 Mihai was not only an outstanding researcher but a fun-loving, larger-than-life personality in the computer science theory community.\u00a0 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1059"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1532,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059\/revisions\/1532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}