Jack Schwartz dies at 79

Jack Schwartz passed away in his sleep early morning on Monday, March 2nd. Jack was the founding chair of the computer science department and the central player in setting the computer science research agenda at Courant in the decades before and after the department's founding; this included seminal work in compilers, programming languages, parallel computing, robotics, bioinformatics, and multimedia. Indeed, most of the large-scale research efforts of the last forty years in the computer science department owe their initial impulse to his vision, his tireless energy, and his omnivorous scientific curiosity. The obituary from the New York Times can be seen at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/science/04schwartz.html.  Details on a special memorial to be held at the Courant Institute can be found here (PDF).