Evi Nemeth | |
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Born | June 7, 1940 |
Disappeared | June 4, 2013 (aged 72) Tasman Sea |
Status | Missing for 3 years, 11 months and 21 days |
Occupation | Author, retired professor |
Known for | Lead author of "bibles" of system administration |
Evi Nemeth (born June 7, 1940 – missing-at-sea June or July, 2013) was an engineer, author, and teacher known for her expertise in computer system administration and networks. She was the lead author of the “bibles” of system administration: UNIX System Administration Handbook (1989, 1995, 2000), Linux Administration Handbook (2002, 2006), and UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (2010). Evi Nemeth was known in technology circles as the matriarch of system administration.
Nemeth was best known in mathematical circles for originally identifying inadequacies in the “Diffie–Hellman problem”, the basis for a large portion of modern network cryptography.
Nemeth received her bachelor's degree in mathematics from Penn State in 1961 and her PhD in mathematics from the University of Waterloo, Ontario in 1971. She taught at Florida Atlantic University and the State University of New York at Utica (SUNY Tech) before joining the computer science department at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU-Boulder) in 1980. She served as manager of the college’s computing facility from 1982 to 1986. She also was a visiting Associate Professor at Dartmouth College in 1990, and at UC San Diego in 1998, while on sabbatical from CU-Boulder.
While at CU-Boulder, Nemeth was well known for her undergraduate systems administration activity, in which students over the years had the opportunity to develop in-depth knowledge and skills in Unix system administration. Together with Steve Wozniak, Nemeth established the Woz scholarship program at CU-Boulder which funded inquisitive undergraduates for many years. Nemeth also has a special talent for inspiring and teaching young people. She mentored numerous middle- and high-school students, who worked with her to support computing in the college and came to be known as "the munchkins". She also mentored talented young undergraduates, taking them to national meetings where they installed networks and broadcast the meetings’ sessions on the Internet on the multicast backbone. She coached the university's student programming teams in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.