Reuven Rubinstein (1938-2012)

I just learned last night that Professor Reuven Rubinstein passed away. While I was not a close collaborator of him, I met Reuven Rubinstein a few times at conferences and during a short visit to Paris, and each time learned from the encounter. I also appreciated his contributions to the field of simulation, esp. his cross-entropy method that culminated in the book The Cross-Entropy Method with Dirk Kroese. Reuven was involved in many aspects of simulation along his prolific career, he will be especially remembered for his 1981 book Simulation and the Monte Carlo Method that is arguably the very first book on simulation as a Monte Carlo method. This book had a recent second edition, co-authored with Dirk Kroese as well. It is thus quite a sad day to witness this immense contributor to the field leave us. (Here is a link to his webpage at Technion, including pictures of a trip to the Gulag camp where he spent most of his childhood.) I presume there will be testimonies about his influence at the WSC 2012 conference here in Berlin.