Sad news:: Albert D. Rich III (April 26, 1949 - August 11, 2023)

[Richard Fateman]

https://math.unm.edu/~aca/ACA/Memoriam/Albert_Rich/

[Nasser M. Abbasi]

On 8/18/2023 10:02 AM, Richard Fateman wrote:
> https://math.unm.edu/~aca/ACA/Memoriam/Albert_Rich/
>

This is very sad news. Condolences to his family and friends.

I never met Albert in person, but we talked by email over the years.

Last email I got from him was just 2 months ago, on June 21, 2023,
replying to a question I had on Rubi.

We will never know how much progress he made on Rubi, and if the
changes he made are saved somewhere, because he told in an email
that he was working on it 40-50 hrs per week for the last 3 years.

Also we will never know what he meant by exactly by this message he posted on

https://app.gitter.im/#/room/#Rule-Based-Integration_Lobby:gitter.im

about one year ago saying:

"I'm working fulltime on what has turned out to be a massive project.
It's driven by my figuring out the math required to integrate expressions
symbolically. I will release a new version of Rubi 4 as-soon-as
it's perfected to my satisfaction. But it's impossible to
predict when that will be, given the creative nature of this open-ended work."

It is the part where he said

"figuring out the math required to integrate expressions symbolically"

It appears he found new methods for integration.

His github code is at

https://github.com/RuleBasedIntegration/Rubi

His main rubi web site is

https://rulebasedintegration.org/

May he rest in peace.

--Nasser

[Dima Pasechnik]

https://github.com/RuleBasedIntegration/Rubi
now contains a commit "Rubi -- Albert's posthumous release from files on his computer."
pushed 2 days ago. It's quite big:

"Showing 228 changed files with 66,189 additions and 16,713 deletions."

[Sam Blake]

Yes, I posted Rubi 4.17.3 which was the latest set of files on Albert's computer. These files underwent a thorough testing process by Nasser. These tests showed that there were some regression issues with Rubi 4.17.3 compared to the previously released 4.16.1. However, I felt that it was better to release this version of Rubi and then look to fix the infinite recursion bugs in the (hopefully near) future.

Nasser can probably comment on the test results and diffs between 4.16.1 and 4.17.3.

My next task is to build a Mathematica 'packlet' and push it to github.

Cheers,

Sam Blake