Patrick C. Fischer

Patrick Carl Fischer (December 3, 1935 – August 26, 2011) was an American computer scientist, a noted researcher in computational complexity theory and database theory, and a target of the Unabomber.

Biography Fischer was born December 3, 1935, in St. Louis, Missouri. and the family moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he grew up. He went on to graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a Ph.D. in 1962 under the supervision of Hartley Rogers, Jr., with a thesis on the subject of recursion theory.

After receiving his Ph.D. in 1962, Fischer joined the faculty of Harvard University as an assistant professor of applied mathematics; his students at Harvard included Albert R. Meyer, through whom Fischer has over 250 academic descendants. as well as noted computer scientists Dennis Ritchie and Arnold L. Rosenberg. Fischer's second wife, Charlotte Froese Fischer, was also a computer science professor at Vanderbilt University and the University of British Columbia, and his brother, Michael J. Fischer, is a computer science professor at Yale University. and his work in this area set the foundation for much later work on parallel algorithms.

Fischer was an early leader in the field of computational complexity, and helped establish theoretical computer science as a discipline separate from mathematics and electrical engineering. and his work on the mathematical foundations of database query languages became central to the databases now used by major web servers worldwide.

Fischer was also an expert in information systems and their use by educational institutions.

Unabomber target Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, was a graduate student of mathematics at the University of Michigan, where Fischer's father was a professor. In 1982, Kaczynski sent the fifth of his mail bombs to Fischer, at his Penn State address; it was forwarded to Vanderbilt, where it was opened on May 5 by Fischer's secretary, Janet Smith, who was hospitalized for three weeks after the attack. Fischer claimed not to have ever met Kaczynski, and speculated that he was targeted because he "went from pure math to theoretical computer science."