Fundamental Problems in Computing

Fundamental Problems in Computing is in honor of Professor Daniel J. Rosenkrantz, a distinguished researcher in Computer Science. Professor Rosenkrantz has made seminal contributions to many subareas of Computer Science including formal languages and compilers, automata theory, algorithms, database systems, very large scale integrated systems, fault-tolerant computing and discrete dynamical systems. For many years, Professor Rosenkrantz served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (JACM), a very prestigious archival journal in Computer Science. His contributions to Computer Science have earned him many awards including the Fellowship from ACM and the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award.Professor Christopher L. Barrett (Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA): Professor Rosenkrantz has produced numerous seminal results in formal languages, algorithmic complexity and databases over the course of his career. From his 1967 context-free grammars paper to his recent work on dynamical systems, he has provided the computer science community with a wonderful collection of results which are of theoretical and practical importance. This book is a very appropriate attempt by the community to honor his vision and thank him.Professor Zvi Kedem (New York University, New York, NY): Many of Dan's publications have informed and inspired research in several areas of Computer Science. My own work on concurrency control was influenced by his seminal contributions to that area. This volume, containing a number of Dan's best papers and contributed chapters by well-known researchers, is a fitting tribute to a truly distinguished researcher.Professor R. Ravi (Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA): Professor Rosenkrantz's work has touched upon fundamental and practical issues in all aspects of theoretical computer science including canonical forms for grammars, very early worst-case analysis of TSP heuristics, characterizing serializability and consistency in concurrent databases, new models and algorithms for hierarchically specified data and mining time series data. The scope and depth of Dan's invaluable contributions to Computer Science are captured in this volume.Professor Jeffrey Ullman (Stanford University, Stanford, CA): I have known Dan since the year before we entered Columbia Engineering School as freshmen. His work has been a model for how one uses theoretical skills to make an impact on real problems, and I wish him well in his retirement.Professor Moshe Vardi (Rice University, Houston, TX): Dan Rosenkrantz's career spans over 40 years of designing and analyzing algorithms. Unlike many other algorithms researchers, Dan has always sought algorithms in their native application domains, in compilers, in concurrency control, in network design, in query evaluation, and in many more areas. We learn from him that algorithm design and analysis is one of the most fundamental activities in computer science.