from Hacker News

UC Berkeley research fellow Michael Cohen dies at 25

by rudimental on 10/4/17, 9:02 PM with 36 comments

• by anjellow on 10/5/17, 12:23 AM

  If anyone's interested, I found video of Michael Cohen as a guest lecturer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3umLs_SnhQ

• by santaclaus on 10/4/17, 11:18 PM

  How does one publish 30 papers in 3 years? That is an insane rate!

  Just navigating the political ramifications, dealing with revisions, etc, on three or four a year is a serious pain in the ass, let alone ten.

• by nschiefer on 10/5/17, 1:36 AM

  I'm a friend and colleague of Michael's at MIT. This article is very nice and gives a good summary of what made Michael so special. In a lot of ways, Michael was the animating "spirit" of the MIT theory group. He had an encyclopedic knowledge and incredibly deep understanding of basically every area of computer science, and many areas beyond; in the short year that I knew him, we had conversations about everything from convex optimization to computer architecture to rent control laws to Medieval philosophy.

  Michael was a truly remarkable researcher. Ludwig's comments about him being the type that you "only see a couple of times in a generation" are accurate. I also recommend watching the start of Yin-Tat Lee's recent talk [1] at the Simons Institute. Yin-Tat is a prolific researcher himself, so his comments carry a lot of weight.

  For those wondering about Michael's publication count: computer science (and especially theoretical computer science) is a "high publication" field, in part because of the nature of publishing in conferences and in part because the field is young and there are many good open problems. Still, Michael's publication record is abnormally strong and reflects his collaborative nature. Regarding the comments about co-authorship, Michael could easily have been a co-author on a dozen more papers if he had cared, since he often contributed the main ideas to projects that he never formally joined. This was definitely my experience collaborating with him. I expect that Michael will be more prolific in the next year than many living researchers, from the point of view of publishing.

  His papers (incomplete list here [2]) are very well written, by the way. I recommend checking them out.

  The most incredible thing about Michael was the way he learned. If you talked about something that he didn't understand, he'd quiz you about it until he did. And he did this with everyone, from brand new grad students like me to famous professors.

  At the same time, Michael was incredibly generous. He liked to talk, and you could interrupt him at any time and he'd explain everything to you with astounding patience. Michael wasn't in science for glory; he just really loved learning and teaching. He's already profoundly missed and our entire community is shocked by his untimely passing. My deepest condolences go to Michael's family.

  We hope to have a memorial website up soon, especially since Michael was too humble to have much of an online presence.

  [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pIheZseT1U

  [2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=t3kDJHQAAAAJ...

• by tabeth on 10/4/17, 11:41 PM

  Life is so precious. To think any one of us reading this could be gone tomorrow.

• by notfromhere on 10/5/17, 2:16 PM

  How does one die of natural causes at 25?

• by mfukar on 10/5/17, 8:25 AM

  I'd only made the acquaintance of Michael through a mutual friend. In but a few hours, I became convinced this person is one in a billion. What a pity.

• by imranq on 10/5/17, 5:20 AM

  Live as if you were going to die tomorrow, learn as if you were going to live forever – Gandhi

• by ssalazars on 10/4/17, 11:38 PM

  How does someone dies of "natural causes" at 25? This sounds more like an unknown health condition.