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Recruiting Committee
Department of Computer Science
Tufts University
Medford, Massachusetts  02155
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Dear Recruiting Committee:

Richard Beigel was twice my teaching assistant in a course on computability,
first when he was a junior in math, second as a first-year computer science
graduate student.

The first time, he was learning the material himself as he went along.  It did'nt
matter.  He was as good a TA as I've had for ten years or more, and the others as
good are well known professors now. Last fall I told him, by phone, about some
ideas for a new way to present computability, that I call device-based.  On a
few months' notice, he based his Johns Hopkins course on the idea, apparently
successfully, and sent me about sixty pages of notes he had distributed, all of
them clear and to the point.  The instincts for clarity and for elegance are
both at home with him.

I read his doctoral dissertation.  It involved oracle-based computation, about
which I know little, so I can't evaluate it in context, but it was full of
ingenious proofs of delightful and unexpected results.

He lived in my house for a year or so.  I would do it again.  He was honest,
stable, useful, a thoroughly satisfactory housemate.  While we are not
particularly close temperamentally, we consider each other friends.

In the past year or two he has been turning out an amazing number of papers,
mostly I think on oracle-based complexity theory, but some on practical aspects
of computer science, such as sorting.

I expect to continue to hear good of him.

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Sincerely,
Robert W. Floyd
Professor
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