Events and news relevant to the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science

[Andrzej Tarlecki <tarlecki@mimuw.edu.pl>]

So sorry to hear this...

He completed his PhD about the time I arrived to Edinburgh in 1983, so I 
met him only briefly then, with a few meetings later on his shorter 
trips to Europe. Most vividly though I recall an occasion some ten years 
later (1996?) when on my first visit to Beijing (summer school organized 
by Dines Bjorner's UNIIST) I was also invited by him to give a lecture 
at his university (then called Beijing University of Aeronautics and 
Astronautics I believe). What I thought was to be a research seminar to 
a small group of computer scientists turned out to be a lecture to a 
crowd of a thousand or so Chinese students... I recall how proud Wei Li 
was both of his students, and their interest in coming to a lecture by a 
foreigner, as well as of the university building and most importantly of 
the new computer equipment they had at the time -- really impressive 
line of labs for students' work with hundreds of personal computers. He 
was talking and showing all this to me with such a visible enthusiasm, a 
well-deserved feeling of starting something important and a vision to 
develop this much further. I've never met him in person afterwards...

There is a Chinese-perspective obituary at Beihang Uni pages: 
https://ev.buaa.edu.cn/info/1022/3005.htm

Andrzej

W dniu 2026-01-27 12:45, Don Sannella napisał(a):
> I'm sorry to report that Wei Li [1], who got a PhD [2] in Edinburgh
> under Gordon Plotkin in 1983, died on Sunday in Beijing aged 82.
>
> Not many people now in LFCS will remember Wei. He arrived in 1980 from
> China in the first wave of students that China sent abroad and ended
> up doing his PhD in 3 years of incredibly hard work, meaning that he
> was probably the first person from China to get a PhD abroad. He
> arrived without much English - he wouldn't have been allowed to start
> a PhD nowadays - and with a Computer Science education consisting
> mainly of figuring out how the software on a Soviet copy of an IBM
> computer worked, without access to documentation or source code.
> Before that he got a mathematics degree from Peking University and
> then spent years during the Cultural Revolution doing manual labour,
> meaning that he was 37 at the start of his PhD.
>
> After Edinburgh he went back to China where he had high-flying
> positions including Professor and eventually President of Beihang
> University, member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and high-level
> involvement in decisions about funding for Computer Science research
> in China.
>
> In Edinburgh he shared an office with Mark Jerrum and me. He called me
> his "everyday life supervisor". We went to the cinema where during
> Jaws he stood up and shouted that the actors should watch out for the
> shark, and he had nightmares after another film that had an unhappy
> ending. He said that in China all films had happy endings. We had fun
> cooking together, where he taught me a little about Chinese cooking
> and I taught him to make spaghetti Bolognese.
>
> Links:
> ------
> [1] 
> https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FLi_Wei_(computer_scientist)&data=05%7C02%7C%7C1196fc7a8498475e294508de5d99a135%7C2e9f06b016694589878910a06934dc61%7C0%7C0%7C639051111565355780%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=QGBPqFTt8b4Cg8kQvRnawjIk7yl05dxZjKEWOC8STAk%3D&reserved=0
> [2] 
> https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fera.ed.ac.uk%2Fitems%2Fd5dea306-882d-4c31-bcca-df643af9bea0&data=05%7C02%7C%7C1196fc7a8498475e294508de5d99a135%7C2e9f06b016694589878910a06934dc61%7C0%7C0%7C639051111565391785%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=aChVlX%2FHQfJh2SNseEc8TvS79vbYcIAzbdwf55WcYR4%3D&reserved=0