RIP

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by LaurV

Not mentioning that the photo looks a bit racist, doctored to whiten her face (I had no idea she was black, before reading the article, and then looked more carefully to the photo, her arms, etc).

I don't think the photo was doctored. She was rather light-skinned -- undoubtedly light enough to "pass."

[Xyzzy]

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/25/busin...dies-scli-intl

[Dr Sardonicus]

Thich Quang Do

HANOI – Thich Quang Do, a dissident Buddhist monk who has effectively been under house arrest since 2003 and was nominated multiple times for the Nobel Peace Prize, has died at age 93.

Head of the banned Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, the vocal patriarch was born in 1928 in Thai Binh province and spent most of his life advocating for religious freedom and human rights in communist-run Vietnam.

His staunch activism landed him under what was effectively house arrest in 2003 in Ho Chi Minh City, where he was under constant surveillance.

Do died on Saturday night at Tu Hieu pagoda, UBCV announced on Sunday morning.
<snip>
In 2001, he wrote an “Appeal for Democracy” and also called on northern and southern dissidents to drop their cultural differences and unite in 2005.

He received Norway’s Rafto human rights award the following year for “his personal courage and perseverance through three decades of peaceful opposition against the communist regime in Vietnam.”

The UBVC has been banned since the early 1980s, when it refused to join the state-sanctioned Vietnam Buddhist Church.

[Jan S]

Hosni Mubarak:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-51630142

[pinhodecarlos]

Clive Cussler

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-51644229

It is with a heavy heart that I want to share the sad news that my husband, Clive passed away on Monday. It has been a privilege and a great honor to share in his life. I want to thank you, his fans and friends for all the support, for all the good times and all the adventures you have shared with him. He was the kindest, most gentle man I ever met. I have always loved him and always will. I know, his adventures will continue.
Clive Cussler, July 15, 1931 – February 24, 2020

[R.D. Silverman]

Originally Posted by pinhodecarlos

Peter Montgomery

I had not heard. I am quite sad over this. Peter was a very good friend and the best
problem solver that I have ever known.

I only found out from the RSA-250 announcement by INRIA.

I am very surprised at the lack of any prior announcement. This was 10 days ago.

[pinhodecarlos]

Can’t even find my post...if I did post.

[axn]

Originally Posted by R.D. Silverman

I only found out from the RSA-250 announcement by INRIA.

Ditto.

[xilman]

In time honoured tradition, would you like the good news or the bad news?

The bad news is that Paul Zimmerman (often Paul Z. and I are called "the other Paul", quite interchangeably) has reported this to the cado-nfs mailing list:

We would like to dedicate this computation to Peter L. Montgomery, who
passed away on February 18, 2020.

The good news is that this computation completes the record-breaking factorization of RSA-250.

Peter and I were friends for many years. We both worked at Microsoft Research; SWMBO and I entertained him for dinner at our home one evening when he was visiting Cambridge and, of course, we attended numerous professional gatherings together, including sitting jointly on PhD defense panels. He was half of my justification for a low Godel number.

In the field of computational number theory he was world-renowned. As well as a skilled mathematician he was an "optimizing compiler" par excellence, making numerous and brilliant improvements to the speed of many important algorithms. His eponymous modular multiplication is ubiquituous; his parallelization of the Lanczos algorithm made the linear algebra stage of the NFS feasible; his square-root algorithm improved the NFS markedly; his Fourier extension to stage 2 of ECM and P-1 significantly increased the size of factors discoverable by those algorithms, and so on in many other areas.

Added in edit:a couple of others posted between my composing my posst and reading theirs.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by pinhodecarlos

Can’t even find my post...if I did post.

The pointer is to your post on Clive Cussler.

I dug up a few more mentions of Peter Montgomery's passing on social media. The last one includes one of his papers.

https://iacr.org/people/PeterMontgomery.html

https://twitter.com/EllipticKiwi/sta...45893991432192

https://medium.com/asecuritysite-whe...p-3b97ccabe06c

[xilman]

https://www.mainepublic.org/post/ren...as-died-age-96

${Deity}! They're dropping like flies this month.