from David Karger

I only shared time with Sam on a few occasions but they generated wonderful memories. The first was during his job search---boy did I want to hire him at MIT! I was so impressed by his work and the tremendous clarity with which he presented it to people outside his area. We had occasional conversations later, but my singular memory is of day during his time at MIT, when we spent a few hours walking along the river as he described an we worked on a problem. At this point I don't really remember the details---something about improving Viterbi for HMMs, where we worked out a pretty nice solution but got scooped a couple of months later---but what hasn't faded at all is the feeling of warmth, friendliness, and freewheeling intellectual enthusiasm that I got from Sam during that conversation. It's going to make a treasured memory.