It is with immense regret CSE must announce the passing of a member of our professional family. Eitan Gurari, Associate Professor, passed away Monday, June 22, 2009. This was a sudden and unexpected death leaving us all stunned and saddened.
Dr. Gurari was born in Israel in March 1947. He attended Technion - Israel Institute of Technology where, in 1971, he received Bachelors of Science in Physics. He continued his studies there, but changed focus to Computer Science receiving a Masters degree in 1974. The University of Minnesota granted him a Ph.D. in 1978 (Computer Science) after which he taught at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee and the State University of New York at Buffalo. He joined the Ohio State University Department of Computer Science and Engineering in 1982.
Dr. Gurari started his career as a theoretician. He made fundamental contributions to automata and complexity theory. His textbook, An Introduction to the Theory of Computation, was highly praised and he published frequently in JACM, SIAM Computing, ACM STOC, and IEEE FOCS. After joining OSU, Gurari switched his research focus, starting to build software systems. His most recent Software Engineering research interests covered hypertext processing and Braille production. His creation, the TeX4ht system, has been widely used worldwide in the scientific community for publishing research papers on the Internet and is generally considered to be the best application to translate LaTeX into other formats. He often received emails from users praising and appreciating the various software systems he had single-handedly built.
Eitan leaves behind his wife, Shaula Gurari, two sons and three daughters. The funeral will be Friday, June 26, 11:00 a.m., at the Epstein Memorial Chapel. The family will be sitting Shiva at their home.
Dr. Gurari was a dedicated researcher and amicable colleague. This is a deep loss to CSE and our most heart-felt condolences go to his family in their loss.