It is with immense grief and sadness that we wish to share the sudden demise of Dr. Mario Diaz Torres on Saturday August 31, 2024 in Mexico City.听 Mario was an associate researcher at the prestigious Institute for Mathematical Applications to Systems Sciences (IIMAS), which is a part of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City.听
Mario was a gifted mathematician who got his Bachelors degree from the University of Guadalajara, his Masters from the Center for the Investigation of Mathematics (CIMAT), Guanajuato, Mexico, where he worked with Mexican statistician Dr. Victor Perez Abreu. He received his PhD from Queen鈥檚 University, Canada, where he worked with Drs. James Mingo and Serban Teodor Belinschi and also collaborated with IT researchers Drs. Fady Alajaji and Tamas Linder. His research work included topics on random matrix theory and free probability as well as information theoretic privacy. Following his PhD, Mario worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Drs. Flavio Calmon (Harvard) and Lalitha Sankar (ASU) from 2016-2018. At ASU, his fellowship was funded directly by an award from the office of the Dean of Engineering. At the time of his death, Mario held the position of associate researcher (a tenured position) at IIMAS. He was one of the recipients of the 2024 ITSOC travel grant for mathematicians, and was so delighted to be welcomed so by our community.听
Mario was a passionate researcher who was able to bring together ideas in statistics and information theory and apply them to study emerging problems in differential privacy, robust classification, and fair machine learning. He was also actively working with leading researchers in the area of random matrix theory. His sudden death is a major loss for the information sciences and statistics community across the world and, in particular, in Mexico, where he was regarded as a rising star building bridges across various technical communities. He is survived by his mother, sister, wife Jhoana, and their precocious young son, Mario Jr., who Mario was homeschooling so he can 鈥渢each him mathematics in a principled and advanced manner鈥.
If you wish to help, here is a created by his colleagues in Mexico to help his family. Please note that the currency is in Mexican Dollars ($ MXN). For example, $2000 MXN is $103 USD. We hope you can help the grieving family. If you knew Mario, please consider leaving a note for the family 鈥 amidst their grief, they have been immensely touched by the outpourings of praise and love for Mario.听
We expect to hold a series of talks in Mario's memory at his favorite conference, ITA, in San Diego in February 2025. We also welcome all of your comments and remembrances; you can either share with us directly via email (Lalitha : [email protected], Flavio: [email protected], Shahab: [email protected]) or add it to this . We hope to share it with his family at an event commemorating his work to be organized by IIMAS in Mexico City in early 2025.
听
Shahab Asoodeh, Flavio Calmon, and Lalitha Sankar
听