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\address
Mr.\ Ronald Book
5862 Stow Canyon Road
Goleta, California  93117
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Dear Mr.\ Book:

Richard Beigel was twice my teaching assistant for a course in formal languages
and computability, equivalent to the first eight chapters of Hopcroft and
Ullman.  He was a treasure.  Even as an undergraduate in his third year,
he was intellectually disciplined and imaginative.  He helped me compose
exams, found counterexamples, explained mathematical proof to students with
weak backgrounds, and generally took on responsibilities.

Recently, I suggested to him an approach to the course using definitions that
allow constructing automata from arbitrary assemblages of input, output, and
memory devices, and composing such automata functionally.  Within a few 
months he sent me something like fifty pages of clear course notes in which
he had elaborated the idea.  I was impressed.

I was a reader of Beigel's dissertation.  I'm not qualified to judge it in
context, but it was full of pretty results; it was a pleasure to read.

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Sincerely,
Robert W. Floyd
Professor
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