Imre Simon

Who is Imre Simon?

Imre Simon was a Hungarian-born Brazilian mathematician and computer scientist. His research mainly focused on theoretical computer science, Automata theory, and tropical mathematics, a subject he founded, and which was so named because he lived in Brazil. He was a professor of mathematics at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. He was also actively interested in questions of intellectual property and collaborative work, and was an enthusiastic advocate for open collaborative information systems, of which Wikipedia itself is an example.

He received his Ph.D. at the University of Waterloo in 1972, under Janusz Brzozowski with the thesis: Hierarchies of Events with Dot-Depth One.

He died of lung cancer in São Paulo, Brazil on August 13, 2009, aged 65.