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Professor Richard B. Kieburtz
Professor and Chairman
Oregon Graduate Center
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
19600 N.W. Von Neumann Drive
Beaverton, OR  97006-1999
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Dear Professor Kieburtz;

Because Oregon Graduate Center is a pure graduate school, I am prefixing
this paragraph to my usual letter.  Beigel has a very active research
program.  He writes papers on his own, but he also has been turning
out joint papers with some of the best people in theoretical computer
science.  I am sure this is the primary reason for his recent receipt of
a Young Presidential Investigator Award.

I am writing in behalf of Richard Beigel after explaining to him that
I would have to study recursive function theory for months to be ready to
read most of his work.  Reviewing his doctoral dissertation, of which I was
a reader, I am again struck by the number of original ideas, in a world where
one distinguished computer scientist considers the two-idea dissertation 
a rare accomplishment.  Beigel seems to have combined the paradigms of
oracle-based recursive function theory and of computational complexity
theory, and has spun off a variety of (apparently) novel and surprising
results, elegantly demonstrated, and many of them demonstrably the
strongest available results.  I may have seen more important dissertations,
probably Tarjan's and Earley's, but I can't recall one as rich in variety
of results.

I can not comment further on his subsequent work on this subject, as I do not 
know that literature.  He has, however, written a few papers that fall into
classical areas of computer science: sorting, searching, and algorithmic
information theory.  While not earth-shaking, they are solid and professional.

I met Richard as my teaching assistant when he was a junior in math at
Stanford.  He picked up the subject (computability theory) as he went
along, and was as good a TA as I have had in the past eight years.  He already
had the right instincts for simplicity and generality.  I considered him
a valued colleague.  He TAed for me again, and we have stayed in contact over the
years.  He is industrious and conscientious.  He has a first-rate mind; I can 
explain half-baked notions to him, and I seldom have to explain twice.

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Sincerely,
Robert W. Floyd
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