Brown CS News

This autumn, Brown University's Department of Computer Science and Center for Computational Molecular Biology (CCMB) presented a conference upon the occasion of Sorin Istrail’s seventieth birthday and CCMB’s twentieth Anniversary. SorinFest: Phase Transitions in Computer Science and Computational Biology was held on October 6 and 7 in Room 368 of the Thomas J. Watson Sr. Center for Information Technology and on Zoom.

Keynote speakers included Craig Venter, Bonnie Berger, Andy Clark, Ken Dill, Misha Gromov, Gene Myers, and J. Michael Kosterlitz. Professor Kosterlitz’s lecture also served as the inaugural lecture in Brown University’s new Ising-Onsager Distinguished Lecture Series. The initial proposal for this lecture series (“Proposal for the Ernst Ising Distinguished Lecture Series”) was made to Brown University’s Dean of the Faculty on May 20, 2011 by Sorin and colleagues from the Departments of Chemistry and Physics. The Ising-Onsager Distinguished Lecture Series builds on and revises that proposal.

Following the Distinguished Lectures, some of the attendees (described by Sorin as his mentors, heroes, and collaborators carrying the brilliant torch forward) presented short talks and remembrances. Other speakers included Franco Preparata, Brown University An Wang Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and visionary founder of CCMB, and Brown University Provost Francis Doyle and President Christina Paxson, who joined dinner guests at the Hope Club in a toast for the Center for Computational Molecular Biology’s 20th Anniversary.

A talk by Sorin closed the event. His remarks included an In Memoriam section with remembrances of beloved mentors, friends and heroes: Paul Erdos, Edsger Dijkstra, John Conway, Alberto Apostolico, Eric Davidson, Solomon Marcus, Ken Arrow, Julie Nguyen Brown, Robert Zimmer, Ernst Ising, Lars Onsager, and John von Neumann.