Joseph Halpern

Joe Halpern, ‘towering’ computer scientist and mentor, dies at 72

Joe Halpern was a professor of computer science. His research focused on the interface between game and decision theory and computer science, on reasoning about knowledge and uncertainty, and on causality. He also did work on security, (fault tolerant) distributed computing, and modal logic. His work was at the boundary of a number of fields. He said, "I once gave a talk in the economics department at Princeton where I described myself as someone with a Ph.D. in mathematics, who calls himself a computer scientist, and is giving a talk to economists about a subject mainly studied by philosophers. That's probably the best one-sentence description I can give."