My dear friend, Rajeev Motwani, passed away yesterday at his home. He had an unparalleled zest for life, a broad range of interests, and an incredibly sharp intellect.

May his wife Asha and his kids and his family have the strength to bear this monumental loss.

My relationship with Rajeev was not a professional one, just a personal one. I would often ask him about his work, and internally have a deep sense of envy of anyone who was his student.

He told me that this semester he was teaching a class on Computer Algorithms, and I told him that I’d taken a class with a similar name over two decades ago using a textbook by “Hopcroft and Ullman” and he said that book has now become “Hopcroft, Motwani and Ullman”

I was fascinated by the lucid way he explained solutions to many problems we encounter in the software world.

Over a beer at the Tied House last summer he also told me about his PhD thesis on building a machine to figure out if a problem is solvable or not…he made things appear so simple. I remember the fun discussion we had about whether his machine would be able to determine if Fermat's last theorem was solvable.

Who knew that he was a winner of the Godel Prize in theoretical computer science!