Benny Chor

I just heard that Benny Chor died this morning. Chor did very important work on computational biology and distributed algorithms, but I (and probably many of my readers) know him primarily for his work on cryptography, for his work on randomness extraction and for introducing the notion of private information retrieval.

I only met him once, at the event for Oded Goldreich’s 60th birthday. On the occasion, he gave a talk on the Chor-Goldreich paper, which introduced the problem of randomness extraction from independent sources, and which introduced min-entropy as the right parameter by which to quantify the randomness content of random sources. He did so using the original slides used for the FOCS 1985 talk.

I took a picture during the talk, which I posted online, and later he sent me an email asking for the original. Sadly, this was the totality of our correspondence. I heard that besides being a brilliant and generous researchers, he was a very playful, likeable and nice person. My thoughts are with his family and his friends.