[CPM-SPIRE-L] Terrible news about Danny Breslauer

[Gregory Kucherov]

I was shocked by this news. 
Let me share some of my memories about Danny. 
I knew him for a very long time. I don't remember when we met for the first time, somewhen in the mid-90s. He held a post doc position in Saarbrucken at that point. I invited him to apply to INRIA Nancy (where I worked then) what he did, but unfortunately the applicaiton was delivered by the post the day after the deadline and was not accepted by the administration. 
Since then we have been in contact, both professional and personal. 
I remember I met him once in NYC during the years that he was out of the academia. He didn't look happy, he was clearly missing the academic environment and wanted to return. After his return to Haifa, he ardently resumed the research work and, within a couple of years, wrote several outstanding papers, joint with colleagues. Let me just mention the paper on near real-time suffix tree construction joint with Giuseppe Italiano (best paper award at SPIRE'11, if I remember well) that, in my view, contains the best exposition of (improved) Wiener's suffix tree algorithm. 

Without attempting to overview Danny's contributions, let me mention another example of Danny's scientific perspicacity: in his PhD thesis (1992) he made a conjecture about the complexity of computing runs under an unbounded linearly-ordered alphabet. Only 20+ years later this conjecture (still not fully solved) became mature and was studied in a series of recent papers. 

Recently, after leaving the academia again, Danny kept attending by himself community events, such as CPM or Dagstuhl seminar, where we continued our discussions. Undoubtedly our community was his "scientific family" to which he was deeply attached. His talent, his warm and open character, his frankness will be always remembered. 

Gregory