Sad News: Berthold Vöcking

I have just seen the news that Berthold Vöcking passed away.  For those who didn't know him, Berthold was an oustanding researcher in algorithms.  We had several shared interests and were of a similar age;  I always enjoyed his work, and very much enjoyed the few times that I worked with him.  His paper How Asymmetry Helps Load Balancing still amazes me, and is one of the most wonderful papers that I wish I had written.  When I first saw it I simply didn't believe the main result*;  I stopped my other work, wrote up a simulation, and found it matched his analysis.  I then had to spend the next few days understanding it.  Once I understood it, I wondered how he had seen it, and how I had missed it.  It is a truly inspired paper.  

Of course he has other great papers, including the well known Tight Bounds for Worst-Case Equilibria, and maybe the less well known but very interesting (particularly to me) work on Balanced Allocations:  The Heavily Loaded Case.  He had just won a best paper award for ICALP for work on Online Independent Sets.  He was one of the editors of Algorithms Unplugged, a wonderful book project. 

Berthold was regularly on my list of people to invite to workshops, because he always had very interesting work to present and was interesting to talk to.  I can't believe I won't have another chance to talk with him.  His passing is a loss to our community.  

* For those who care, his result was that when hashing using the "power of two choices", suppose that instead of having each new item make two random choices and then placing the item in the least loaded, you split the table into two equal halves (call them left and right), have each item make a random choice from each half, and then place the item in the least loaded, except that you always break ties to the "left half".  There wouldn't seem to be any difference between the two schemes, but there is;  the split-and-break-ties approach works significantly better.