The Missing Question (David Notkin, 1955-2013)

One of the great pleasures of research is the sense of community: shared dedication to a subject, shared arguments, shared meals. You meet the same people, again and again, as you rotate through the same set of professional meetings ... Berlin, Vancouver, Boston, Zurich. So it was with David Notkin. We were, typical professional acquaintances, we would meet in the breaks of conferences and in programme committees, we would joke and gossip, as one does. We would circle around our rather different approaches to the subject, seeking meeting points and assessing progress.

Though he had been ill for a long time, and though he had been frank about his illness and the prognosis, it is still immensely shocking to hear of his death. I guess that, when you see somebody only at intervals, it is too easy to see them as an occasional, but essentially reliable, comet that appears, fades to the distance and then, in time, returns. It will be difficult to hold the fact of his death in mind.

Anybody who encountered David must naturally have been struck first by his appearance. His large 'Old Testament' beard made him stand out and when complemented with the tie-dyed, West Coast, t-shirts he liked, he was unmissable, even amongst computer scientists. Physically animated he conveyed the enthusiasm for our discipline in his gestures and his urgent conversation. I see him now, arguing a point in a conference hall, at a coffee break, head bent slightly forwards,  with colleagues surrounding him, absorbed, passionate.

Perhaps this image is particularly appropriate because he was dedicated to the scientific community. He was an organiser and an inspirer, one of those people who 'make things happen'. He cared about the collective endeavour, did all he could to support it, he took it seriously, as it deserves to be taken.

He was, of course, a scientist of considerable stature and his work, which concerned itself principally with the construction of language-based tools and methods to support programming, has made an important contribution to the discipline of software engineering. Scientific rewards rarely accrue to to those who skip from problem to problem, rather persistence and focus pay off, honing a method on a range of problems, testing where it works and fails to work. This is increasingly rare in a scientific community with a shortening attention span. His work undoubtedly benefited from this persistence.

The work too, has an idiosyncratic style. Rigour and clarity, yes, but also a touch of the urgency and enthusiasm that characterised the man. This style and exposition are sufficiently distinctive to be traceable in the work of his students. Most academics know that our legacy is not our work but our students, we convey to them more than ideas and techniques, but also patterns of thought and judgment, the things that imbue work with a personal quality. David stood out as an educator and mentor.

So, the wheel turns and the cycle of research and meetings continues in motion. We will prepare talks, get on planes, meet friends, and sit jet-lagged in hotel basements. I will look around and expect to see David, expect his question to the speaker, cutting through to the essence with a humorous edge, and it will not come.