Professor Emeritus Dimitri Bertsekas, influential computer scientist and prolific author, dies at 83

Dimitri Bertsekas, an emeritus professor at MIT and a widely influential computer scientist, has died at the age of eighty-three. According to MIT News, Bertsekas passed away on June third at his home in Belmont, Massachusetts. Over a long career he shaped fields including optimization, control, large-scale computation, reinforcement learning, and artificial intelligence, and he taught at Stanford, the University of Illinois, MIT, and Arizona State. Colleagues remembered him above all as a gifted writer and mentor, author of more than twenty books and textbooks known for turning difficult ideas into clear explanations. MIT says his joint work on neuro-dynamic programming helped define concepts that later became central to reinforcement learning.

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