IN MEMORY OF MARCO PROTASI.

On February 1st, 1998 Marco Protasi's life has been defeated by a long and terrible illness that took him away from his family, his friends, his colleagues, his students.

He was Professor of Computer Science at the University "Tor Vergata" of Rome since 1987, where he was most loved by colleagues and students. Marco was born in Spoleto, in Umbria, the 'heart' of Italy, 47 years ago and graduated in Mathematics in 1973. In his research activity he has been mostly interested in computational complexity and the approximate solution of computationally hard problems seen from various points of view: approximation algorithms with guaranteed performance, probabilistic analysis, heuristics; his work also regarded neural networks and learning. His major scientific contributions concern characterizations of NP-hard optimization problems by means of structure preserving reductions and combinatorial properties, algorithms for dynamic maintenance of approximate solutions to covering problems, local search and tabu search heuristics for solving satisfiability problems, learning of DNF formulae, applications of recurrent neural networks in speech recognition. Marco was also author of five text books in algorithmics, computability, discrete mathematics and he was currently working on a book devoted to approximation algorithms.

Working with him was a pleasure, not only for his scientific talent but also because he used to bring in the research work the same open minded, positive, even joyful, attitude that was a characteristic in his private life.

Marco, we will miss you.

(Photos by Angela, Marco's wife.)
(Text by Giorgio Ausiello)