Longtime MIT Professor and Prolific Computer Scientist Arvind Mithal Dies at 77

Longtime MIT professor and prolific computer scientist Arvind Mithal died on June 17. At age 77. The Indian American, who went by the mononym Arvind,  transformed computer architecture, parallel computing & digital design, enabling faster computation. 

He is survived by his wife, Gita Singh Mithal, their two sons Divakar and Prabhakar,  their wives Leena and Nisha, and two grandchildren, Maya and Vikram, according to MIT News. 

Regarded as “a pillar” of the MIT community, Arvind was the Charles W. and Jennifer C. Johnson Professor in Computer Science and Engineering. He was also the head of faculty of computer science in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and led the Computation Structures Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). 

Those who knew Arvind told MIT News that he was “a rare individual whose interests and expertise ranged from high-level, theoretical formal systems all the way down through languages and compilers to the gates and structures of silicon hardware.”

His interest in parallel computing began while he was a student at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur. After graduating in 1969, he earned a master’s degree in 1972 and a Ph.D in computer science a year later, from the University of Minnesota. Before joining MIT, he taught at the University of California at Irvine from 1974 to 1978.

His work on dataflow and parallel computing led to the Monsoon project in the late 1980s and early 1990s, MIT News said. In collaboration with Motorola, his group, “built 16 dataflow computing machines and developed their associated software,” according to MIT News. One Monsoon dataflow machine is now in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. 

See Also

Luxury Brand Chanel’s India-born CEO Leena Nair Among This Year’s ‘Time Women of the Year’

As “funding for research into parallel computing began to dry up,” in the 1990s, he shifted his focus, MIT News said. Instead, “he began applying techniques his team had learned and developed for parallel programming to the principled design of digital hardware.”

Over the past decade, “he was dedicated to advancing undergraduate education at MIT by bringing modern design tools to courses, and incorporating Minispec, a programming language that is closely related to Bluespec,” MIT News said. 

He was honored with membership in the National Academy of Engineering in 2008 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. He was also named a distinguished alumnus of IIT Kanpur, his undergraduate alma mater.

(Top photo credit, M. Scott Braue)