Luca Trevisan (1971-2024)

The theoretical computer science community and science at large suffered a great tragedy today.

Luca Trevisan has been one of my intellectual and personal heroes since I joined the field. His work on pseudorandomness, complexity, cryptography and algorithms has been a strong influence on my work. Whenever I wanted to understand a new topic, often the best source would be an exposition by Luca. He had a way of cutting to the heart of the matter and explaining the key insights behind technically difficult results. Luca loved life and was a great friend to many of us. I will cherish my memories of our times together both when I lived in New York and when I visited him in Berkeley. He was always the best person to follow for a great meal, and my wife and I still enjoy the pasta recipe he taught her in his SF home. I was always looking forward to visiting Luca at Bocconi university, which he and his colleagues have turned into a TCS powerhouse.

Luca‘a blog, in theory, was an inspiration to my own. His combination of math, humor, and humanity made it one of of my favorite reads. A great example was the sequence of posts Luca organized in 2012 for the Turing centennial by Gay and Lesbian computer scientists. In the final post, Luca wrote that we should do this again in 2054, in the centennial of Turing’s death. Tragically, this will not be possible.

Luca passed away today at 11:50am Milan time, with his husband Junce and other people who supported him till the end by his side.

Luca was due to give an inspirational talk at the TCS4all workshop on Monday June 24 12:30pm pacific time. He prepared the slides in his last few weeks and the talk will be given in his honor. I urge all the TCS community to attend. Registration is on https://sigact.org/tcsforall/