Sedgewick to Emeritus Status

Retire from your job, but never retire your mind.

Bob Sedgewick is becoming an emeritus professor:

When Faculty transfer to emeritus status and retain a professional connection with Princeton, they are expected to conduct their future research and University-related activities with the same ethical standards currently expected from all Princeton Faculty.

Emeritus faculty members may receive such University publications as the Princeton University Bulletin and the Princeton Alumni Weekly, as well as agendas and minutes of University Faculty Meetings. They may attend meetings of the University and departmental faculty upon invitation, but do not have votes at these meetings. Emeritus faculty members continue to receive University identification cards and to have use of the library, the athletic facilities and dining facilities on the same basis as active faculty members.

A not so recent picture:

Some History

Sedgewick got his PhD at Stanford and returned to Brown to start his academic career as an assistant professor in 1975. He was promoted to associate professor in 1980 and full professor in 1983. At Brown, he participated in the founding of the computer science department, in 1979.

Later in 1985 he joined the faculty at Princeton as founding chair of the Department of Computer Science. Two founding positions—pretty neat. His first-year courses in computer science are among the most popular ever offered at Princeton. He also pioneered the practice of replacing large live lectures with on-demand online videos—pretty clever.

Bob has worked at research institutions outside of Princeton during summers and leaves. Three come to mind:

• IDA, the Institute for Defense Analyses, gave him an opportunity to work with the CRAY-1 supercomputer.
• PARC, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, gave him an opportunity to see the personal computer come into existence.
• INRIA, The Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, gave him a chance to work closely with Philippe Flajolet

I joined him at IDA a few years later. I had to get a security clearance which is another whole story—see this post for some fun thoughts.

Some More History

Bob and I wrote some papers together: Two were on VLSI. The first on lower bounds on the size of chips that computed something and the second on a language ALI for designing VLSI circuits.

Another paper was included also Jin-yi Cai and Andy Yao on Towards Uncheatable benchmarks. Or see a follow-on paper.

Open Problems

It was wonderful working for Bob when he was the chair of Computer Science and wonderful working with him on the above papers and more.

Bob, have a wonderful time being retired. And happy emeritus status.