Witold Lipski

Witold Lipski Jr. (July 13, 1949, in Warsaw, Poland – May 30, 1985, in Nantes, France) was a Polish computer scientist (habilitation in computer science), and an author of two books: Combinatorics for Programmers (two editions) and (jointly with Wiktor Marek Combinatorial analysis. Jointly with his PhD student, Tomasz Imieliński, created foundations of the theory of incomplete information in relational databases.

Witold Lipski Jr.
BornJuly 13, 1949
Warsaw, Poland
DiedMay 30, 1985(1985-05-30) (aged 35)
Nantes, France.
NationalityPolish
Alma mater
Known forcombinatorics, incomplete information, VLSI, Lipski Award
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
Doctoral advisorWiktor Marek
Doctoral students

Life

Lipski graduated from the Program of Fundamental Problems of Technology, at the Warsaw Technical University. He received Ph.D. in computer science at the Computational Center (later: Institute for Computer Science) of the Polish Academy of Sciences, under supervision of Prof. Wiktor Marek. The dissertation title was: 'Combinatorial Aspects of Information Retrieval'. His habilitation was granted by the Institute of Computer Science of Polish Academy of Sciences. Lipski spent academic year 1979/1980 at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and the last two years before his death, at the University of Paris.

Jointly with his doctoral student, Tomasz Imielinski, Lipski investigated foundations of treatment of 'Incomplete Information in Relational Databases'. The results of these investigations were published in the bibliographical items[1] [2] [3] [4] in the period of 1978 through 1985. This collaboration produced a fundamental concept that became later known as Imieliński-Lipski Algebras.[5][6][7]

Again, in collaboration with Imielinski, Lipski studied the semantical issues of relational databases. These investigations were based on the theory of cylindric algebras, a topic studied within Universal Algebra. According to Van den Bussche,[8] the first people from database community to recognize the connection between Codd's relational algebra and Tarski's cylindric algebras were Witold Lipski and Tomasz Imieliński, in a talk given at the very first edition of PODS (the ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems), in 1982. Their work,"The relational model of data and cylindric algebras" [9] was later published in 1984.

Additionally, Lipski contributed to the research in the area of algorithm analysis, specifically - by discovering a number of efficient algorithms applicable in the analysis of VLSI devices (collaboration with Franco P Preparata),[10] time-sharing in database implementations (collaboration with Christos Papadimitriou),[11] computational geometry (as applied to shape recognition, again, in collaboration with Franco Preparata).[12]

Lipski was an author of a book on combinatorial algorithms, Combinatorics for Programmers ("Kombinatoryka dla Programistow", in Polish). This book has had two editions (one of these posthumous) and it was also translated in Russian. Additionally, jointly with Wiktor Marek, Lipski published a monograph on Combinatorial analysis.

Personal

Witold Lipski Jr. is survived by two children, Dr. Kasia Lipska, endocrinologist, and Dr. Witold Lipski, neuroscientist. Father of Witold Lipski Jr. was a well-known economist and politician Witold Lipski Sr..

Lipski died in Nantes, France, after a long battle with cancer. He is buried at Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw, Poland, (Location: C/39 (5/7)).

Witold Lipski Prize for Young Computer Scientists in Poland

Witold Lipski Prize is the most prestigious award for young Computer scientists in Poland. Many are inspired by a brilliant career of Witold Lipski whose life was cut shot by a terminal illness. The Prize is awarded for achievements in the area of theoretical and applied Computer Science. It has been created by the initiative of a group of Polish Computer Scientists active outside of Poland and in Poland. The submissions for the Prize are limited to applicants with exceptional accomplishments, who are younger than 30, or who are younger than 32, in case if a candidate was on maternity/paternity leave. The Prize is administrated by the (Polish) Foundation for Computer Science Research,[13] in cooperation with Polish Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery,[14] and Polish Computer Science Society.

See also

References
  1. Lipski Jr., W. (1979). "On Semantic Issues Connected with Incomplete Information Databases". ACM Transactions on Database Systems. 4 (3): 262–296. doi:10.1145/320083.320088.
  2. Imieliński, T.; Lipski Jr., W. (1981). "On Semantic Issues Connected with Incomplete Information Databases". Proceedings VLDB. 4 (3): 388–397.
  3. Lipski Jr., W. (1981). "On Databases with Incomplete Information". Journal of the ACM. 28 (1): 41–70. doi:10.1145/322234.322239.
  4. Imieliński, T.; Lipski Jr., W. (1984). "Incomplete information in relational databases". Journal of the ACM. 31 (4): 761–791. doi:10.1145/1634.1886.
  5. Green, T.J.; Karvounarakis, G.; Tannen, Val (2007). "Provenance Semiring". Proc. ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART, PODS: 31–40.
  6. T.J. Green (2009). Models for Incomplete and Probabilistic Information; Chapter 2, in Managing and Mining Uncertain Data. Springer Link.
  7. Karvounarakis, G.; Green, T.J. (2012). "Semiring-Annotated Data: Queries and Provenance" (PDF). ACM SIGMOD. 41 (3): 5–14. doi:10.1145/2380776.2380778.
  8. Feferman, S. (2006). "Tarski's influence on computer science" (PDF). Logical Methods in Computer Science. 2 (3). arXiv:cs/0608062. Bibcode:2006cs........8062F. doi:10.2168/lmcs-2(3:6)2006.
  9. Imieliński, T.; Lipski Jr., W. (1984). "The relational model of data and cylindric algebras". Journal of Computer and System Sciences. 28 (1): 80–102. doi:10.1016/0022-0000(84)90077-1.
  10. Preparata, FP.; Lipski Jr., W. (1984). "Optimal three-layer channel routing". IEEE Transactions on Computers. 33 (5): 427–437.
  11. Lipski Jr, W.; Papadimitriou, Ch. (1981). "A fast algorithm for testing for safety and detecting deadlocks in locked transaction systems". Journal of Algorithms. 2 (3): 211–226. doi:10.1016/0196-6774(81)90023-7.
  12. Lipski Jr, W.; Preparata, FP. (1980). "Finding the contour of a union of iso-oriented rectangles". Journal of Algorithms. 1 (3): 235–246. doi:10.1016/0196-6774(80)90011-5.
  13. "Polish Foundation for Computer Science Research".
  14. "Polish Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery".
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