Shahab Asoodeh

I received a short message on Sunday saying that Mario passed away the night before, on August 31st. I couldn’t believe it at first—I thought it might be one of those scam emails. Just five hours before his sudden passing, he was still sending me messages, actively working on a draft, and, as always, finding the most subtle errors in a long and messy argument. That was Mario, meticulous to the very end. How can this be?

I first met Mario in the “Real and Complex Analysis” course at Queen’s. He barely took any notes, yet he remembered all the results, even the ones from previous lectures. He immediately stood out. I asked him a question about the construction of Lebesgue measure, and it turned out he was just as brilliant at explaining and simplifying counter-intuitive math concepts.

We've been friends ever since. In the fall of 2013, I got an office in the basement of Jeffery Hall, right next to his. He was in room 108, and I was in 104. Almost every day, it became our routine to knock on each other's doors around 6 p.m. and just talk. We talked about everything—his new math discovery of the day, religion, politics, problema del mal, his favourite sport, Formula 1, and his favourite mathematician, von Neumann.

When I started working on my thesis, like many others, I had my ups and downs. In both, Mario was the first person I talked to. When I got my first paper accepted, I shared the news with him, and only after discussing the results did I realize that I could do much better. It surprised me because his research (random matrix theory and free probability) was so different from mine. Yet, he pushed me to aspire for better results.

We started meeting more regularly, discussing our work on the chalkboard with Hagoromo chalks! After a year, we finally published our first joint paper in 2015. Working with Mario was like a roller coaster: after a tough scrutiny of all details (and inevitably finding some subtle holes in the proof), putting together the results and finally writing them up was so rewarding.

Our collaboration grew stronger each year. Fast forward to ISIT 2024 in Athens, where he was so passionate about a new technique he had developed for lower-bounding privacy guarantees of iterative algorithms. He immediately started working on the details and couldn’t wait to finalize the result. Little did I know, I suggested we finish another project on metric DP that we’d been working on with James, a mutual friend. Mario promised he’d complete that project in 2-3 months. He immediately started working on it so actively as soon as he returned from ISIT. Mario kept working on this project until the last few hours of his life.

He messaged me at 10:36 a.m. on Saturday, asking me not to read the draft yet because he wasn’t completely satisfied with one of his proofs. I didn’t reply right away, thinking that he’d perfect it in no time, as he always did, and then I’d respond. If only I could go back in time and reply to his message…

This is the last message he sent to both me and James, just a few hours before he left us:

I owe most of my professional development to Mario. I learned so many things from him in the last 12 years. He was an amazing person, a brilliant man, an incredibly talented mathematician, a true researcher, …, and a great friend to me.

Rest in peace, my friend. I really miss you.

ISIT 2018, Vail, Colorado

Mario took this photo in my office in 2013. He said I look like Princess Leia :)

Mario playing chess with Vasilios Kotronias, a chess Grandmaster, Athens, 2024

Last day in Kingston, 2017

CLAPEM, São Paulo, 2023

Christmas talks, Kingston, 2015