Carl Smith 1950-2004

Maryland Professor Carl Smith passed away last night losing his year and a half battle with brain cancer. He was an expert in inductive inference and an active member of the computational learning community. He traveled extensively making many connections in Holland, Germany, Japan and especially Latvia where he is a foreign member of the Latvian Academy of Science.

Carl Smith also played an important role in the computational complexity community. He organized conferences in the early 80's at Perdue and Maryland on Recursion Theoretic Aspects of Computer Science, precursors to the current IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity. He also co-organized the third Complexity (then called Structures) conference in Georgetown in 1988.

Carl was a colleague and a good friend. We both had sabbaticals in Amsterdam in 1996-7, wrote some papers together and often visited each other afterwards. We shared a love of beer and baseball; I would plan my trips to Maryland around the Orioles home schedule.

I always enjoyed the time I spent with Carl and the many interesting discussions we've had. I, my family, and the entire theory community will miss him greatly.