Personal FileA theorist with a solid background, blessed with common sense rarely found in his peers, Imre Simon passed away at home in the early morning hours of August 1, one day before his 66th birthday. He had been diagnosed with lung cancer in the second half of last year, and this disease cut short the brilliant career of the retired full professor from the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of São Paulo/USP’s Institute of Mathematics and Statistics/IME-USP. Greatly beloved and respected by his colleagues, students and members of the academic community, admired in national internet circles because of his support for open source software, open access to education and scientific knowledge via the internet, Simon was one of the pioneers of computer sciences in Brazil. Former president of the Brazilian Society of Mathematics, he was a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences/ ABC and one of the creators of FAPESP’s Programa Tecnologia da Informação no Desenvolvimento da Internet Avançada/TIDIA, Advanced Internet Information Technology Program.
Simon lived in Hungary, his native country, until the age of 13. The convoluted political situation in Hungary at the time led his family to immigrate to Brazil. “But he always made it a point to introduce himself as a Brazilian,” says Nataniel Simon, one of the professor’s three children. And he was considered as such by the international scientific community; this community referred to the intricate field of mathematics, of which the USP professor was one of the pioneers, as tropical geometry.
Simon’s academic career began in 1962, when he was accepted into the electronic engineering course at USP’s Polytechnic School. This is where his long relationship with mathematics and computers began. “At that time, he worked with USP’s first computer,” Tomasz Kowaltkowski recalls. Kowaltkowski is a retired professor from the Computer Sciences Institute at the State University of Campinas/IC-Unicamp), who had been friends with Simon since their days at the Polytechnic School. The Brazilian studied for his master’s and doctorate degrees in computer science at Canada’s Waterloo University in the early 1970’s. He went to University Paris Diderot – Paris VII for his post-doctorate studies, which he concluded in 1980. He was a leading specialist on algebraic inversions of finite automations, but he also had a broad interest in computer science. From the point of view of application, the automata theory is a tool that produces algorithms that can be used in several kinds of software.
Researcher Claudia Bauzer Medeiros, a professor at IC-Unicamp, said that Simon “consolidated lines of research, courses and departments,” in the field of computer sciences in Brazil and in the State of São Paulo, especially at USP and Unicamp. “He pursued the ideas he believed in and was greatly respected even by those who disagreed with him,” says Claudia. “Professor Imre Simon’s significant contribution to Brazil’s scientific development is undeniable. He was instrumental in introducing computer sciences to Brazil. He always collaborated enormously with FAPESP and his ideas shaped the Foundation’s programs,” says Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, scientific director of FAPESP. “He is going to be greatly missed.”
In the course of five decades, Simon was outstanding on various fronts. In 1965, together with Kowaltkowski and Claudio Lucchesi, from the then USP’s Computer Sciences Center, he helped organize the first computer-based college entrance exam in Brazil. Two years later, he was invited by the then Minister of Finance, Delfim Netto, to create a computer program to calculate inflation rates, which stood at three digits at that time. “That was a major achievement, considering that the memory of those computers only went up to 20 thousand decimal digits,” wrote Christian Choffrut, from the University of Paris Diderot – Paris VII, and Yoshiko Wakabayashi, from IME-USP, in the preface to a special issue of Rairo – Theoretical Informatics and Applications journal, published in honor of Simon in 2005. “He was a source of inspiration,” says Yoshiko, who worked on her Master’s Degree under Simon in 1977, and later on was his colleague at USP’s Computer Science Department for many years.
In another chapter in the referred journal, Canada’s Denis Thérien, from McGill University, comments on the doctorate thesis prepared by Simon at Waterloo University in 1972, the title of which is Hierarchies of events with dot-depth one. “His work had an enormous impact on the automate theory, and now, 30 years later, we can truly appreciate his good sense in terms of selecting interesting issues and his brilliance in resolving them,” Thérien said. In his opinion, Simon’s doctorate thesis is a “masterpiece.”
The praise that he had always been given never changed his simple and accessible way of being. “He was totally modest and unassuming,” says Arnaldo Mandel, also a professor at IME-USP and one of the first master’s degree students to have been advised by Simon. “He treated everybody equally and knew how to listen even to those whose ideas differed radically from his.”
In a text published on the Pesquisa FAPESP site, Rogerio Meneghini, scientific coordinator of the SciELO Brasil program, paid homage to the pioneer of computer sciences in Brazil. “Although I am not a professional in this field, I can only resort to my acquired self-confidence to identify the characteristics of the personality of those people with whom I have had the privilege of interacting,” Meneghini wrote. “Imre exhaled intelligence, he loved to teach even during an informal conversation, and he was passionate about sharing his insights on this astonishing new world of computer sciences and the Internet. He did this inside and outside the classroom and this influenced everybody around him.”
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