[O1] ================================================ AMAST Links 02 07

                          Valentin Antimirov

  Dr. Valentin Antimirov died on May 31, 1995 after a severe disease.
Valentin was an active member of the AMAST community. The enclosed
obituary notice, which will appear in the Bulletin of the EATCS, throws
more light on the personality of Valentin.

  Our colleague and friend, Ukranian computer scientist Valentin
Antimirov died on May 31 in Nancy (France) after a severe illness. He
was only 34 years old and he was working virtually until his last day.
  He was born on May 4, 1961 in Grozny (Russia).  He studied in Moscow
in one of the strongest of the Moscow Institutes - the Institute of
Physics and Technics. After his graduation he lived and worked in Kiev
(Ukraine). So, he was a son of this strange big country which ceased
to exist in 1989, but which left so many evil traces in so many
people's lives. He lived in Kiev already in 1986, the year of
Chernobyl explosion which, who knows, might have been fateful to him.
  In 1989, when two of the present authors visited the Glushkov
Institute in Kiev, Valentin was heading a dynamic research group
working on equational reasoning and algebraic specification.  At that
time, only few scientific connections existed between the West and the
former Soviet Union, but our clear feeling was that Valentin's work
deserved a much better recognition. The contrast between the high
quality of research and poor working conditions was striking. The
whole group of about ten people shared a single room and three East
German PC's, on which they were developing very interesting and
innovative software, implementing the newest ideas of algebraic
specifications.
  In March 1991 Valentin made a visit to Nancy which gave rise to a 
tighter collaboration with the Nancy group.  He also established
contact with Aarhus (Denmark) the same year, and held a post-doc
position there for 12 months, during which he started what was to be
his last passion: an intense study of the theory of regular
expressions, reading everything there was to read on the subject, and
finding novel techniques for implementing decision problems.  In April
1993 he moved to Copenhagen to continue this work.  In January 1994 he
took a a position of visiting scientist in Nancy and began to work in
France.  Once one of us proposed that he should write a little survey
on the complexity of various regular expression problems. He said that
he liked the idea but he had rather to work on new results. He was in
hurry. Despite the disease, he worked more and more. He gave a talk at
STACS'95 (his picture at STACS'95 appeared in the last EATCS
Bulletin). Those who participated at RTA'95 should remember him
discussing, questioning, arguing. Finally, he had a paper accepted for
the FCT conference in Dresden in August 1995 that he didn't have
chance to present.
  Valentin loved discussing. On various topics, scientific or not.
Among scientific topics there was one to which he was especially
partial throughout his career: algebraic specifications. He taught
algebraic specifications to students of Kiev University. He was very
devoted to this scientific idea and carried such an amount of
conviction that other people easily got convinced too.
  Those who knew Valentin beyond his scientific life will recall him
and his wife Tatiana playing guitar and piano and singing. His
repertoire was composed of Okudjava, Nikitin, and other such authors
so familiar to the Soviet intelligentia. These songs belong to the
so-called `amateur song' movement that started at the end of
Khruschev's `thaw' and was pursued during almost 20 years of Brezhnev's
era. This was a form of protest, escape, revelation, intellectual food
for a whole generation.
  He was struggling against his disease until his last days, despite
the knowledge that there was no escape. Last time he came to work in
the office was on May 18. That day he escaped from the hospital in
order to send the final version of his FCT paper.  After that he
continued to work in the hospital on his powerbook. On May 31 he
passed away.

  Gregory Kucherov (Nancy)
  Pierre Lescanne (Nancy)
  Peter Mosses (Aarhus)