WAISers:Istvan Simon

Few WAISers have had as international a career as Istvan Simon, whose bio follows:

ISTVAN SIMON was born in Budapest, Hungary where he grew up to age 10. In 1956 he witnessed as a young boy the Hungarian revolution, an event that had a profound influence on his political education and views. Indeed, both his enduring love of freedom and disdain for totalitarian governments can be traced to this experience.

Following the Soviet Union’s brutal invasion that extinguished temporarily the flames of freedom in Hungary, a large number of Hungarians voted with their feet and fled to Austria. Istvan’s family was also planning to leave, but family events conspired to keep them from leaving. By the time these were resolved it was too late and the Iron Curtain had descended once again, making crossing into Austria or through Yugoslavia too dangerous. Istvan’s parents applied for an emigrant passport, and, after bribing suitable Hungarian officials, the family was granted a passport valid for Australia, where they had relatives. The family left Hungary flying to Vienna. Once in Vienna, the final destination was changed to Brazil, where they also had relatives, a process that took three months. They were interviewed at the Brazilian consulate in Vienna, where they encountered the first instance of the Brazilian jeitinho. Istvan’s mother was extremely worried that their passport explicitly stated that it was valid only to go to Australia, and asked the Brazilian consular officer about it and whether it would cause problems for them. His reply: “I do not have to understand Hungarian”, and so they were granted visas to immigrate to Brazil. They took a French ship, the “Provence” the next week from Genoa, Italy to Santos, Brazil. On the way the ship stopped in Barcelona, where Hungarians were not allowed to leave the ship thanks to Generalissimo Franco’s welcoming policies. Istvan watched what he could see from the deck of their ship. They also stopped in Dakar, where Istvan saw the first Africans he had ever seen and the bustling port life. They then crossed the Atlantic, and on the way Istvan turned 11. The family settled in Sao Paulo where Istvan grew up and was educated, eventually earning a B.S.E.E. degree from the Escola Politecnica of the University of Sao Paulo, and an M.S. degree in Applied Mathematics. He completed his education at Stanford University, earning a Ph.D. in computer science in 1977, under the supervision of John T. Gill.

He returned to Brazil where he taught at the University of Sao Paulo. In 1979 he published a book, Aspectos Te�ricos da Computacao co-authored with Tomasz Kowaltowski, Imre Simon, Janos Simon, and Cla’udio L. Lucchesi. The book was well received in Brazil, and was awarded the prestigious Jabuti Prize, for the best technical book published in Brazil in 1979. The book is now out of print, but it is available on-line:
http://www.ime.usp.br/~is/atc/index.html
Istvan also wrote another book on Complexity Theory, also out of print, and published a number of papers dealing with Complexity Theory and Analysis of Algorithms.

In January 1978 Istvan briefly returned to Stanford to marry his first wife, Karen Kline, who had been his next door neighbor while both were students at Stanford. They settled in Sao Paulo, and later in Campinas, Brazil. They spent 1983 in Cambridge, England, where Istvan went to do some research with B�la Bolloba’s, a well known Hungarian-British-American mathematician. Several joint papers ensued of their collaboration. They went back to Brazil the next year, but Karen had decided that she wanted to return to the United States, and so they came back to the Bay Area at the beginning of 1986. Istvan and Karen divorced in 1996. Eight years later he met Chunhui Mo on the Internet, and they got married in China in 2004. It was during this trip to China that Istvan became a WAISer when after writing to Professor Hilton he was invited to join this select group of scholars interested in international affairs. Chunhui is also a WAISer and occasionally writes to WAIS when the subject involves China or other subjects dear to her. Istvan is a fairly good amateur violinist and owns a “Nagyvarius” violin, about which he recently wrote in WAIS. Among other things, Istvan is an expert on solar energy, and he founded a company that will produce a new type of solar power system, which will make oil obsolete as a source of energy. Istvan expects to begin selling these systems, currently in R&D, in mid-2007, and he expects that eventually this will make a significant contribution towards putting terrorists out of business worldwide.

Ronald Hilton: For information about the World Association of International Studies (WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its homepage by simply double-clicking on : http://wais.stanford.edu/