The Humble Humorous Researcher: A Tribute to Michel Sintzoff
Axel van Lamsweerde · Formal Aspects of Computing · 2011
Many of us lost a close colleague on November 28, 2010.More than that: we lost a friend.One that we used to meet regularly, all over the world, always listening to us, making interesting comments and suggestions on our work, joking on every occasion and making us discover how much fun our business is.Rather than reviewing his work in detail, this note puts more focus on Michel's rich personality, with the hope that it will bring back fond memories among those who were lucky enough to share some good times with him.The style is intended to be personal and informal.Michel would have hated anything different, to be sure.Born in 1938 in Brussels, Michel completed his master's degree in Mathematics at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) in 1962.After 2 years of civil service as a maths teacher in Katanga (Congo), he entered the MBLE Research Laboratory in Brussels in 1964 (MBLE stands for "Manufacture Belge de Lampes et matériel Electrique").This was a branch of Philips Research Labs specifically dedicated to background research in applied mathematics and computing science.After 18 years of research in programming languages, formal semantics, program analysis and concurrency at MBLE, he joined the newly founded department of Computing Science at UCL in 1982 with new interests in diverse areas such as proof systems, control theory and dynamical systems.Michel contributed to the PhD work of dozens of people in Belgium and France, as supervisor or contributor, without ever having been interested in getting a PhD himself.He received a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble (France) and was a member of the Informatics section of the Academy of Europe.Michel was an Emeritus Professor at UCL since 2003.The two of us were face to face in the same office at MBLE Research for 10 years (1970)(1971)(1972)(1973)(1974)(1975)(1976)(1977)(1978)(1979)(1980), and had adjacent rooms at UCL for another decade (1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003).Programs, 1972) as the precursor paper on abstract interpretation.This paper and others he wrote around that time on program verification and type discovery are heavily cited in the paper generally considered to have opened the field (Cousot and Cousot, 1977).The technique described in his 1972 paper was simultaneously implemented in Paul Branquart's optimizing compiler for Algol68, confirming how powerful it was. Many consider Michel's paper Calculating Properties of Programs by Valuations on Specific Models (Proc. ACM Conference on Proving Assertions about