Dr Richard Crandall has passed away

reed.edu

65 points·salgernon··5 comments

I knew Dr. Crandall personally. This is sad news. It's especially sad to see people, approximately "peers" if that term still has meaning, who are younger than you, who have passed on.

Crandall was 64 and outlived Steve Jobs (whom we both knew), who passed away at 56. I'm 67 and have outlived Crandall. It's not remotely an occasion for rejoicing.

Don't worry, boys and girls, you will eventually find yourselves in the same bittersweet position, with an overall probability of 0.5.

It is never easy when people you know pass away, especially those younger than you. However, I'd argue it is more difficult when the situation happens at a much younger age for the realisation that the deceased were given less time alive than we will receive no matter how abrupt our lives end.

Dr. Crandall was fortunate to have a daughter and time to achieve so many things, more than I can say about some of my peers who left the stage before their twenties. For some of us, the bittersweet position has already arrived.

I had the pleasure of seeing Dr Crandall give a few intimate and very memorable physics seminars while I was attending Reed. He will be missed.

My first book on computing was 'Pascal Applications for the Sciences - a self teaching guide' by Richard Crandall. A wondrous, stimulating and amazingly wide-ranging book in only 246 pages published in 1984 - the early PC days.

Very sad. _Prime Numbers - A Computational Perspective_ (a.k.a. "Crandall and Pomerance") is a seminal book in that field and introduced me to very useful concepts such as Montgomery multiplication.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com