University Times

Alfs T. Berztiss, emeritus associate professor of computer science in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, died Oct. 22, 2013, of pulmonary fibrosis.

Berztiss was born in Latvia on Oct. 12, 1933, became a displaced person in World War II and moved to Australia. There, he received all his degrees from the University of Melbourne: a B.Sc. in physics, 1956; an M.Sc. in physics, 1959, and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, 1965.

He began his academic career at his alma mater in 1957, serving there until 1970. He was a visiting professor at Pitt in the 1967-68 academic year, then joined the University faculty fulltime in 1970, teaching here until the late 1990s. Berztiss retired on Dec. 31, 1998. He also served as a visiting professor at the University of Stockholm, where he was a research associate of its SYSLAB.

His research interests included specification languages for software; automatic transformation of specifications into software; application of artificial intelligence techniques in software engineering, and developing curricula in computer science and software engineering.

He was the author of the books “Data Structures: Theory and Practice,” which had its second edition published in 1975, as well as “Programming With Generators: An Introduction” (1990) and “Software Methods for Business Reengineering” (1995). He was co-author of “Principles of Visual Programming Systems” (1989).

Panos K. Chrysanthis, faculty member in computer science and director of the department’s Advanced Data Management Technologies Lab, said of Berztiss: “He was very encouraging of my database and transaction processing research during my first years as an assistant professor. Maybe one big reason was that we had a similar academic background. We were both physicists before becoming computer scientists.”

Computer science faculty member Rami G. Melhem first encountered Berztiss in the early 1980s, when Melhem was a graduate student in the department. “I took a course from Alfs from which I learned a lot about formal reasoning (in) computer programs and data structures. Alfs had written one of the very early books on this subject.”

Later, Melhem said, “I knew Alfs as a colleague who would do anything in his capacity to help the department. In fact, he did that even after his retirement. For example, when I was chairing the department, I asked Alfs, who was retired at that time, to help organize, coordinate and supervise the offerings of the service courses in the department. He did not hesitate for a minute and, for a period of four years, he found the time to accomplish this task despite all his travels and all his post-retirement engagements.”

Departmental colleague Shi-Kuo Chang said in addition to his professional expertise, Berztiss displayed expertise in the kitchen. “Every Sunday he would cook new dishes for his family and sometimes invite friends to join. Once I asked him how can he come up with new recipes every week? He smiled and said: ‘Well, by applying combinatorics you can come up with an infinite variety of recipes!’ I suspect this was also a way for Alfs to attract his daughters to come home every Sunday.”

Berztiss is survived by his wife, Mara; daughters Leonora and Dagmara, and three grandchildren.

—Marty Levine