[CPM-SPIRE-L] Danny Breslauer

Fri Jan 19 07:45:43 PST 2018

Dear Kunsoo and Zvi, and dear CPMers and SPIRErs:

I wrote few paragraphs for Danny, too many memories occurred.

Ciao
Roberto

====

I met Danny for the first time when we were both at the beginning of our
PhD studies. It was a nice summer school in Acireale (now Lipari School)
with top speakers and PhD students from all over the world. We were sharing
the same room and Danny was returning from a trip to the Vulcano island in
Sicily: he was worried about the smell and the bad conditions of his shoes
due to hard hiking to the volcano site. This was over 25 years ago.

Around that time, I went to visit Zvi Galil's group at Columbia U. in NYC,
and Danny helped me a lot to settle up, open a bank account, etc. (That
year in Columbia was really great, I found new friends there.) Over the
next years I visited Danny when he was in Denmark for a fellowship, and he
also spent six months in Pisa. He then went into the industry job market,
and I reconnected with him some years ago when he decided to come back to
the academia. He went to Haifa in Gadi Landaus's group, and I had a
pleasant visit also there. Communication was very often in Italian, as
Danny was fluent in it. Incredibly, after so many years, when I introduced
someone to Danny, he was still mentioning the fact that he was smelling
like a volcano when we met.

I have many good memories to tell about Danny, but I am a kind of private
person when publicly talking of family and close friends. Thus I prefer to
tell just few things about what Danny had to go through these years,
reporting what he told me in several occasions. He attempted to get back to
academia around 2010, but it was difficult as he had been inactive in
research for several years. Also, most positions were for the junior level,
which was not fitting his age, and he had no recent teaching experience;
moreover, in that period, university jobs were less abundant than before.
Still with some rust, he was the brilliant guy in research and we
coauthored some papers. Danny was full of great ideas... he was still a
quick thinker, even though his ability to write papers was slower than
before.

Sad and short story is that he failed to get back to academia and thus
returned to the industry, working as a software developer for Google. He
clearly did not like this job, and I suspect that the stress was a main
cause of his chronic disease. Even sadder story, Danny lost his job at
Google: a special external company (appointed by Google) investigated
Danny's health, misrepresented the opinion of Danny's doctor, and concluded
that there was no job position in Google suitable for his disease. Thus
after a while, the insurance company started mobbing Danny to avoid to pay
his medical expenses, at the point that they were sending anonymous private
detectives to investigate whether Danny was cheating or not (and he was
not).

Danny was trying to settle in Japan, where he was feeling better and liked
people (he was learning Japanese). Few weeks before dying, Danny confessed
me that he was worried that he had no job and a disappearing health
insurance. I had Skype calls with him over the years, and I met him very
recently, it was in October 2017. I wish I had not delayed a Skype call
with him before the sad news. As it happened with many, it came as a sudden
shock to me.

For me he was the smiling and smart tall guy, a very kind person and nice
talker. As everybody else he had pros and cons, and the latter ones were ok
for me anyway. He called me Robertone because I called him Danone (in
Italian the friendly suffix "-one" means "big"). Here are the links to a
couple of recent pictures with Danny.

https://i62.servimg.com/u/f62/15/22/78/37/danny110.jpg (third from the
right)
https://i62.servimg.com/u/f62/15/22/78/37/danny210.jpg (first from the left)

======

On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 5:05 PM, Galil, Zvi <galil at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:

> Hello CPMers and SPIRErs,
>
> As you know, Kunsoo and Pino are working on a collection of pieces of
> people writing about Danny.
> So far we have about 10 pieces. We need more.
> Some of you wrote beautifully as a response to the terrible news.
> Perhaps you can write something similar and send it to Kunsoo and Pino
> (copied).
> Deadline is the end of January but if needed we will extend it.
>
> See below my piece.
>
> zvi
>
> zvi
>
>
> Zvi Galil, Georgia Tech
>
> I first met Danny in the late 1980s at Tel Aviv University. He was a high
> school student taking courses at the university, usually spending his time
> in the computer unit. He became known as a whiz kid, a fantastic programmer.
>
> Danny took my algorithms course, did very well, and immediately started
> working with me on parallel string matching. This led to a beautiful result
> -- an O(loglogn) optimal parallel algorithm for string matching. We then
> learned that Omer Berkman, Baruch Schieber, and Uzi Vishkin had produced
> similar results for other problems. The combined abstract appeared in STOC
> 1989, and our string matching result appeared in SICOMP 1990. The result is
> still the best known parallel algorithm for string matching, though the
> preprocessing portion has been improved.
>
> The string matching result was more than sufficient for a master thesis.
> There was a minor problem: Danny had to earn both his high school diploma
> (via matriculation examination) and B.S. degree prior to completing the
> master’s degree. He completed all three at about the same time, at the age
> of 20.
>
> From the beginning it was clear that Danny was extremely bright, but also
> that he did things in his own unconventional way, quite different from
> everybody else.
>
> I took Danny to Columbia for Ph.D. studies. He continued to work on
> stringology and produced several nice results. The most impressive one was
> an Omega(loglogn) lower bound for parallel string matching. It implied that
> our algorithm was the best possible in the comparison model. It is still an
> open problem if one can do better in the case of special alphabets, like an
> alphabet of constant size. This result led to a STOC paper in 1991 and a
> SICOMP paper in 1992.
>
> As I mentioned above, Danny was an incredible programmer. This turned out
> to be a mixed blessing. The good part was that he could easily make good
> money. He worked for companies. He completed projects for them quickly, and
> they paid him very well. From their perspective, the alternative was to
> hire a software company that would charge much more and usually take much
> longer. During his studies at Tel Aviv University and Columbia, Danny also
> worked on such projects.
>
> After three years, Danny had enough results for a good thesis. I and his
> fellow students suggested to him to stay another year and make it stronger.
> In the early ’90s the academic job market was not good. But Danny insisted,
> and I let him finish his Ph.D. He was 24. There was a small delay since
> Danny had to pass two of the qualifiers (almost all students complete the
> qualifiers in their first year or two). Danny decided to work and make
> money. In several occasions, he had temporary academic jobs. He kept
> working on research with quite a number of people. He also worked for two
> or three companies, the last being Google. But it did not last long. My
> guess is that Danny was smarter than his managers.
>
> I kept in touch with Danny throughout the years. When I stepped down as
> president of Tel Aviv University and briefly ventured into research in
> 2009, we worked together on streaming algorithms for string matching. We
> tried to understand a FOCS paper about it. We actually never understood it,
> but it turned out we did not have to since we improved it. The result was a
> real-time algorithm for streaming string matching that later appeared in a
> conference and a journal.
>
> I met Danny several times in the Bay Area. Each time I go to the Bay Area,
> I stay with Cosimo Spera in San Francisco. We run four miles in Crissy
> Field, two miles to the Golden Gate Bridge and two miles back. Cosimo was a
> friend of Danny’s, and occasionally the three of us would go out to dinner.
> The last time I saw Danny was in Venice in June 2016 at the conference in
> memory of Alberto Apostolico. Alberto was also a friend of Danny, and they
> wrote a number of papers together.
>
> All of his life Danny had health issues. We knew this, though we didn’t
> know details and never thought they were serious. Danny kept working on
> research and kept publishing. Last month we got from Gadi Landau the
> terrible news, the message from Iris, Danny's sister. We were shocked.
>
> We will always remember Danny as very bright, nice, and gentle, with a
> good sense of humor.
>
>
>
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