ACM SIGACT news distributed computing column 15

The Distributed Computing Column covers the theory of systems that are composed of a number of interacting computing elements. These include problems of communication and networking, databases, distributed shared memory, multiprocessor architectures, operating systems, verification, Internet, and the Web.

This issue contains two items:

• An eulogy in memory of Shimon Even, who passed away on May 1st, 2004. He was a highly influential educator, and played a major role in establishing computer science education in Israel. He did pioneering work in various areas, including parallel and distributed computing. As Oded Goldreich says in his PODC 2004 proceedings eulogy, Shimon Even was a great scientist and a remarkable person. His attitudes toward research have influenced anybody who was fortunate to have an interaction with him, he always followed his own judgment and understanding, rather than the common trend or fashion. He sought simple solutions that uncover the essence of the problem. He spent much time seeking the best way to present his own work as well as the work of others in lectures and writing. This quote comes to mind, about having found a good problem to work on.

<i>Not that I quite know indeed what situations the seeking fabulist does "find"; he seeks them enough assuredly, but he discoveries are, like those of the navigator, the chemist, the biologist, scarce more than alert recognitions. He comes upon the interesting thing as Columbus came upon the isle of San Salvador, because he had moved in the right direction for it---also because he knew, with the encounter, what "making land" then and there represented.</i>

Henry James

• The 2004 Gödel Prize is great news for the distributed computing community: it is shared between two journal papers that discovered a fundamental relation between distributed computing and topology, by Maurice Herlihy and Nir Shavit, and Michael Saks and Fotios Zaharoglou. To celebrate this, I am happy to present personal perspectives by the authors of these papers, and by Elizabeth Borowsky and Eli Gafni, that coauthored a third paper with the discovery, but only in a conference and hence not eligible for the prize. I include perspectives also by other people that produced seminal work on the same subject: Soma Chaudhuri and Shlomo Moran.

The DISC conference is collocated this year with GETCO, a workshop on topological methods in concurrency and distributed computing. They will dedicate a joint session to celebrate the prize.

Many thanks to the contributors of this issue.