Patrick C. Fischer

Patrick Carl Fischer (December 3, 1935 – August 26, 2011) was an American computer scientist, a noted researcher in computational complexity theory and database theory, and a target of the Unabomber.

Fischer was born December 3, 1935, in St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Carl H. Fischer, became a professor of actuarial mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1941, and the family moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan where he grew up. Fischer himself went to the University of Michigan, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1957 and an MBA in 1958. He went on to graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a Ph.D. in 1962 under the supervision of Hartley Rogers, Jr., with a thesis on the subject of recursion theory.

After receiving his Ph.D. in 1962, Fischer joined the faculty of Harvard University as an assistant professor of applied mathematics; his students at Harvard included Albert R. Meyer, through whom Fischer has over 250 academic descendants. as well as noted computer scientists Dennis Ritchie and Arnold L. Rosenberg. In 1965, he moved to a tenured position as associate professor of computer science at Cornell University, and again in 1968 he moved to the University of Waterloo where he became a professor of applied analysis and computer science. At Waterloo, he was department chair from 1972 to 1974. He then moved to Pennsylvania State University in 1974, where he headed the computer science department, and moved again to Vanderbilt University as department chair in 1980. He taught at Vanderbilt for 18 years, and was chair for 15 years. He retired in 1998, and died of stomach cancer on August 26, 2011 in Rockville, Maryland.

...
Wikipedia