[seek] joseph goguen

Wed Jul 5 10:28:54 PDT 2006

This is very sad news. I had only recently learned that he had been
ill for some time, but don't know the nature of his illness.

The CS department web site (http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/index.php)
currently displays the following page 

In Memoriam

Professor Joseph Amadee Goguen passed away peacefully in the early morning of July 3, 2006. He was in the company of his wife Ryoko, daughter Alice, and a few close family friends. He is also survived by another daughter Heather and a son Healfdene.

Professor Goguen was a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He joined the department in January 1996. He was the Director of the Meaning and Computation Lab, and had previously directed the program in Advanced Manufacturing. He came to UCSD from Oxford University, where from 1988 to 1996 he was the Professor of Computing Science in the Programming Research Group at Oxford University, Director of the Centre for Requirements and Foundations, and a Fellow of St. Anne's College. Prior to that, he was at SRI International (formerly called Stanford Research Institute) in Menlo Park, California, where he held the position of Senior Staff Scientist as well as being a Senior Member and head of the Programming Languages Area of the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. He had also taught at Berkeley, Chicago and UCLA, where he was a full Professor of Computer Science.

Professor Goguen held a Bachelor degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Berkeley, both in mathematics. In 1999 he won a Senior Fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and he held a Research Fellowship in the Mathematical Sciences at the IBM Watson Research Center where he organized the "ADJ" group, as well as three Senior Visiting Fellowships at the University of Edinburgh. In addition, he was a Distinguished Lecturer in Parallel Computation at Syracuse University, has given distinguished lectures at Glasgow University, UC Irvine, the Universities of Texas, Lisbon, and Illinois, and has given invited addresses at conferences on formal methods, metaphor theory, software re-use, requirements engineering, semiotics, distributed systems, and sociology. His listing in the CiteSeer most cited authors in computer science has varied between about 85 and 120.

Professor Goguen was a pioneering researcher in many diverse areas: software engineering (especially specification, modularization, architecture, requirements and evolution); database integration and ontologies; user interface design; new media art; logic and theorem proving; discourse analysis; sociology of technology and science; cognitive semantics; object oriented, relational and functional programming and their combinations; semiotics; and fuzzy logic. Prof. Goguen is particularly known for his role in founding algebraic specification, including abstract data types and the OBJ language, the module system of which has influenced the designs of the Ada, ML, C++, and LOTOS languages. His theoretical work includes the algebraic theory of abstract data types, initial model semantics, institutions, order sorted algebra, parameterized programming, and most recently, database integration, hidden algebra, and algebraic semiotics. He also had research interests in the philosophy of art (especially music), computer security, music, poetry, and philosophy of computation.

Professor Goguen was elected a Fellow of the International Fuzzy System Association, was nominated for a Turing Award, and was a Fellowship at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. He had received awards for two websites that he maintained, a "Creativity Award" from Art & Technology for the UCSD Semiotic Zoo site, and a "Key Resource Award in Formal Methods" from Links2Go for the hidden algebra site.

Professor Goguen graduated a total of 29 doctoral students, including three from the University of Chicago, two from Stanford, seven from UCLA, 14 from Oxford, and four from UCSD.

During the last week of June 2006, a three-day festschrift was held to honor his contributions to the field of computer science on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Over 40 computer scientists from around the world gathered at UCSD to recognize Professor Goguen's achievements. Professor Goguen was able to attend the festschrift, and used the occasion to encourage his colleagues to continue to work together. A volume containing papers from the festschrift has been published by Springer-Verlag.

>>> On Wed, 05 Jul 2006 08:34:44 -0600
>>> Deana Pennington <dpennington at lternet.edu> wrote: 
DP> 
DP> We just heard from Jenny Wang that Joseph Goguen passed away Monday, 
DP> after an illness.  I don't know any other details, but wanted to let 
DP> everyone know.
DP> 
DP> Deana
DP> 
DP> -- 
DP> ********
DP> 
DP> Deana D. Pennington, PhD
DP> Long-term Ecological Research Network Office
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