Tribute to Paul Feautrier

A message from Eric Fleury, Director of the Inria Center in Paris

It is with deep emotion and great sadness that we announce the passing of Paul Feautrier on April 16. Paul Feautrier was a professor emeritus at the École normale supérieure de Lyon and a member of the joint PARKAS project team (ENS-PSL, Inria).

A graduate of the École normale supérieure (class of 1958), he earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1959, a DEA in astrophysics in 1962, and defended his doctoral thesis in 1968 on a topic in computational astrophysics, under the supervision of Jacques Arsac and Jean-Claude Pecker. He began his career at the Meudon Observatory in 1962, where he served successively as an assistant astronomer, deputy astronomer, and director of the observatory’s computing center. He was then appointed as a lecturer at the Faculty of Sciences in Paris in 1968, which split in 1969 into two universities located on the Jussieu campus: Paris VI and Paris VIII. He became a professor at Pierre and Marie Curie University in 1971, then at the University of Versailles in 1993, where he founded and directed the Yvelines Institute of Science and Technology (ISTY), before joining the ENS in Lyon in 2002.

Paul Feautrier is one of the leading figures in French computer science. His research has spanned computer architecture, operating systems, and all aspects of parallel programming: automatic parallelization, verification and optimization of parallel programs, as well as high-level hardware synthesis. He is the author of the renowned PIP (Parametric Integer Programming) solver, a parametric integer linear programming tool that finds the lexicographic minimum among the set of integer points of a convex polyhedron. He supervised a vast number of theses and trained generations of computer science researchers.

Today, we have lost a colleague and a friend. The entire Inria Paris Center shares in the grief of his family and loved ones. We extend our deepest condolences to his wife, children, and grandchildren, and to all those who loved him, along with the assurance of our most respectful and heartfelt thoughts.

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