I had a lot of great college professors, but Hany Farid (the subject of this article) was always one of my absolute favorites. He always placed a strong emphas

I had a lot of great college professors, but Hany Farid (the subject of this article) was always one of my absolute favorites. He always placed a strong emphasis on strong mathematical fundamentals, once joking in class that we only think AI is hard because we're "bad at math." And to prove it, he showed us endless examples of how the right math makes problems far easier. For example, I remember one time when he showed us how correctly understanding something like the sinc function would improve directional derivatives of sampled data, and then turned this into a better video motion tracker. He loved working with colleagues in other departments, solving all kinds of fun problems and publishing joint papers. At one point, I think the campus magazine was writing articles on him several times a year, because he always had something cool going on.