In Memoriam

Freundschaften schließt man am leichtesten, wenn man jung ist. In den fünfziger Jahren fehlte es mir an Gelegenheiten, mit russischen Wissenschaftlern Freundschaften zu schließen. Auf internationalen Veranstaltungen sah ich lediglich russische Fürsten der Wissenschaft, eindrucksvolle Gestalten wie Pavel Sergeevich Alexandroff, der auf dem Mathematiker-kongreß 1954 in Amsterdam den besten deutschsprachigen Vortrag hielt.

1. A Personal Assessment

Andrei spanned many professional disciplines: Compiler Technology, Theoretical Computer Science, Partial Evaluation and Mixed Computation, Computer Literacy and School Informatics. To me Andrei was a true scholar in the field of Computation Sciences.

Andrei P. Ershov in Nuenen. EWD 1057-0

Whenever Andrei visited the Netherlands in the seventies or early eighties, he tried to extend his visit with a few days so that he could stay the weekend with me and my family in Nuenen, the little village in the Southern part of the country where we lived at the time.

In 1976, Andrei invited Edsger Dijkstra and me on a lecture tour of the Soviet Union, visiting Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and Novosibirsk. He was our constant guide and delightful companion — and in addition, he gave an extempore accompanying translation of our lecture into Russian.

The editors have asked me to note down a few of my personal memories of Andrei Ershov. Although Andrei and I lived on opposite sides of the globe, with about 180o degrees of longitude separating us, his life influenced my own in many positive ways.

Remembering Andrei Petrovich Ershov 1

Andrei Ershov had been a member of Working Group 2.1 on ALGOL of the International Federation for Information Processing since 1966 2.

A Memory of Andrei Petrovi´c Ershov

"I wrote about people whom I met with by destiny"
(I.G. Erenburg, People, Years, Life, Moskva, tom. 2, 1963)

It was a day near the end of 1975 that we invited Andrei Petrovi´c and Nina Mikhailovna for a dinner to our apartment house on the Morskoi street. I was given a book "The destiny of a man" by Mikhail Sholokhov as a present. Indeed, looking back my life, I notice that many things are set just by destiny.

Summary of speech at A.P. Ershov memorial session in Novosibirsk 2006

I first heard of Andrei Petrovich Ershov as a student at DIKU in 1984 while following a course about partial evaluation and mixed computation. One of the central papers presented at this course was "Mixed Computation: Potential Applications and Problems for Study" by A.P. Ershov (TCS 18 (1982) 41-67). The paper shows the now standard example of program specialization: Specializing the power function.

I first met Academician Andrei P. Ershov at the Moscow International Congress of Mathematicians in 1966. I was at once impressed, not only by his extraordinarily broad view of computer science, but by the remarkable scientific and personal energy and leadership which was so evident in him.

In Memory of Academician A.P. Ershov

By chance a letter came my way today that made think of Russia, and thinking about the four trips I have made to Russia made me think about Andrei Petrovich Ershov, and thinking about him led to my writing this post.

Andrei Ershov and IFIP

Andrei Ershov was well known and highly estimated in the international community of information processing. I shall speak in particular of IFIP, where I know most, but Andrei's activities were by no means restricted to IFIP. I have often heard him mentioned by American colleagues with high respect and I shall mention a few non-IFIP occasions where we met.