Wladyslaw Marek Turski (1938-2013)

摘要

Professor Wladystaw (Wlad) Turski passed away on July 18th, 2013. We lost our teacher, senior colleague, and good friend. That was about half a year ago. It took me a long time to gather my thoughts and come to some terms with this loss. In the meantime, on numerous occasions I tried to dial his number, as so many times previously, seeking advice, opinion, discussion, or simply a good chat-in vain now...As with many colleagues of his generation, Wlad came to computing science from another discipline: he studied astronomy. His first serious encounter and the beginning of a lifelong fascination with the challenges and opportunities offered by computing came when in 1960 he had the chance to use a computer at Jodrell Bank to simulate the behaviour of the Draconids (a meteor shower). In fact, astronomy-related computations continued to be a part of his professional activity for another few years. He took up a position at the Computing Centre (later to become the Institute of Computer Science) of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, and gradually became fully involved with programming. He took part in the development of KLIPA, a symbolic programming language for the Soviet-made URAL-2 computer, and designed SODA, an original operating system for the Polish ODRA-1204 computer-both well-known and appreciated by the international community at the time, with his talk on KLIPA at the ACM National Conference in 1963 being perhaps the first computing science presentation in the US by a person from the Soviet block. This very practical line of work continued when he moved to the Institute of Mathematical Machines in 1972.