It is with great sorrow, we received the message that Professor Lars Arge has passed away on December 23rd, 2020, at the age of just 53. His wife Alice and the closest family was with him.
Lars finally has peace after battling kidney cancer for several years. Lars has been very open about his fight in both his personal communication and social media updates. We have witnessed both positive and negative news. Lars faced his cancer with a scientific approach to understanding both illness and treatment options.
His passing is a great loss to the Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, as well as to us personally as colleagues who have benefitted from Lars’s excellent and internationally renowned research contributions within Algorithms and Data Structures, as well as his many ideas on how to build a world-class department ... (read the full obituary by Kaj Grønbæk, Head of Computer Science)
"Lars was a brilliant researcher, a gifted leader, and a true visionary. He was someone who would brighten a room just by entering it, and his laugh was always infectious. He will be missed." Michael T. Goodrich
Left: Lars Arge and Michael T. Goodrich: January 2018, at an American Football playoff game between the New Orleans Saints and Carolina Panthers (Lars' favorite American Football team)
"Lars was a great friend, colleague, and researcher. I remember him contacting me roughly 30 years ago about some work I did on big data, after which we became frequent collaborators on the topic. I especially like the mix of theoretical rigor and practical application that drove Lars. For example, while at the Department of Computer Science at Duke University, along with some other colleagues, we did some of the early work on I/O-efficient ways to process massive amounts of LIDAR data, in our case to compute terrain flow, which can be used to predict how flooding will occur.
Lars seemed to have been expecting his fate after his most recent tumor recurrence. He was valiant during all the treatments, which must have tested his always cheerful demeanor. He will be greatly missed!" Jeffrey S. Vitter, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer & Information Science and 17th Chancellor, the University of Mississippi
Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen in Summer 1998. Lars Arge and Jeffrey Vitter with family.
In the motivation for conferring the degree the Doctorates Board highlights Lars Arges's outstanding achievements in the theoretical foundations of I/Oefficient algorithms, making him a leading expert worldwide, as well as his activities in creating infrastructure for fundamental algorithmic massivedata research and its applications.
