!!Derick Wood In Memoriam
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My dear friend and colleague Derick Wood passed away in Waterloo, Ontario, on October 4, after a long and devastating illness. Apart from the loving
wife Mary and other family, he will be missed by the theoretical computer science community all over the world.
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The respect and appreciation towards Derick’s scientific work became recently apparent in the special issue of The [Journal of Universal Computer Science|http://www.jucs.org/jucs_16_5], published on the occasion of Derick’s 70th birthday. The issue appeared
also as a book with many pictures. I am sure that the numerous contributors to
this issue, as well as other friends and colleagues of Derick, have their own particular memories of this extraordinary person and outstanding scientist. This
writing reflects mainly my personal recollections.
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Derick Wood was born in Lancashire, England, in 1940. He received his
BSc and PhD degrees from the University of Leeds, England, in 1963 and 1968,
respectively. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Courant Institute, New York
University, from 1968 to 1970. This is where I first met Derick, in an Italian
restaurant in lower Manhattan in June 1970. We discussed mostly problems
concerning context-free parsing but I remember Derick also eagerly awaiting
phone calls from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Very soon after
that he joined the Unit of Computer Science at McMaster University, being the
Chair of Computer Science from 1979 to 1982. As will be explained below in
connection with our MSW work, I stayed numerous times in Derick’s house on
Bond Street, enjoying his hospitality. Our work usually continued in the evening
in his house but he also occasionally took me to movies or to a football game.
Derick also organized at McMaster, in March 1973, one of the early conferences
on ''L Systems'', with most of the people active in the field being present.
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From 1982 to 1992 Derick was a Professor in the Department of Computer
Science, University of Waterloo, and after that a few years a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Western Ontario. His last position
was in HKUST in HongKong, where he stayed from 1995 until his retirement.
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Derick Wood worked in numerous areas of theoretical computer science. The
list of his publications contained in the aforementioned special issue consists of
330 entries. His best known books are “Theory of Computation,” published by
John Wiley, and “Data Structures, Algorithms, and Performance,” published
by Addison-Wesley.
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Most of my personal memories of Derick are from our MSW years around
1980. Then we spent long times together, both in Finland and in Canada. The
MSW group, ''Hermann Maurer, Arto Salomaa, Derick Wood'' was very active
scientifically. One can perhaps say that it has been one of the most successful
and happy triples of scientific collaboration. Altogether 30 MSW papers were
published in main journals. We also presented the stuff in many conferences,
although rather seldom all three of us were present. As a matter of fact, we
always worked as follows. Two of us got together in the other’s place and
wrote the paper. Later the third one checked it. But each of the combinations
MS, MW, SW met at least once a year. Undoubtedly Derick’s calm and solid
argumentation was essential for the scientific outcome. Another factor that
made the MSW work so fruitful and pleasant was that nobody ever counted the
amount of work he did. Everybody tried his best and did not worry that the
amount of work was evenly distributed. Sometimes Derick’s dry wit made our
failures seem milder. ''When one cannot solve a problem, then one has to change
the problem'' was one of his remarks.
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Those days it was difficult to get travel money. Most of the time the guest
stayed in the host’s home. This of course meant that working days could be some
14 hours. Derick liked to stay in my country home. We still call the middle
room upstairs ”Derick’s room”. The place is very quiet, no traffic or people
nearby. Still during the summer Derick used to complain about the ”terrible
noise” during the night. The bees started their activities in apple trees already
around 2 a.m. because it was so light. Derick got up latest at 6 and had a good
time with my mother-in-law although they had no common language.
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Derick’s Lancashire background was often present in our discussions. Bolton
and Blackpool were often mentioned, notably because of their famous football
teams. One of our theorems is called the ''Bolton-Blackpool Train Theorem''.
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Although MSW work started to fade out in mid-80’s, I still had many forms
of scientific cooperation with Derick. Apart from occasional joint publications,
Derick served as an external examiner for some of my Ph.D. students, and vice
versa. Many memorable happenings come to mind from these later years. My
wife and I will not forget our visit to the Valamo Monastery during Easter
1985, or our stay in HongKong in 2002, Derick’s apartment on 55th floor and
his expertise on moon cakes. During last years we still met Derick a few times
in London and in Waterloo.
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Derick Wood was a wonderful scientist and a great person to have as a friend.
''Dear Derick, we will miss you. Sit tibi terra levis.''
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Kingston, Ontario, October 5, 2010\\
''Arto Salomaa''
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Download this text as a pdf [file|memder.pdf].
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[{Image src='Wood_Derick.jpg' caption='Derick Wood with his wife Mary and Sheng Yu' height='500' alt='Derick Wood' align='center'}]