This session is dedicated to greeting remarks and shared heart-warming anecdotes from Olivier’s colleagues and friends.

It grew out of Charles Consel’s initial tribute to Olivier, which is reproduced below verbatim.

I met Olivier in 1987 while I was doing my Master’s degree in Paris. At the time, my focus in Computer Science was programming languages: their design and their implementation. My heroes were the computer scientists who designed and implemented the very tools I used daily. I was fascinated by their perspicacity and their expansive thinking. How could they be so thorough and detailed?

With this worldview, I went to attend Olivier’s talk. He was presenting a line of work pioneered by researchers in Denmark, called Partial Evaluation, which seemed related to programming languages. He began his presentation with a level of enthusiasm I had never witnessed before. He described Partial Evaluation as a unique field of research, with properties that were completely mind-boggling, especially the Futamura projections. Partial Evaluation, he argued, was a promising avenue of research and deserved everyone’s interest. After his talk, I introduced myself and tried to squeeze in a barrage of questions before he had to leave.

Olivier convinced me to study Partial Evaluation for my Master (DEA in France), and he propelled me to submit my first results to ESOP 1988, which became my first publication. As typical of his scientific fairness, this publication was single-authored and – just as typically – he taught me how to present my work. This publication enabled me to score a PhD scholarship, and I dedicated my PhD to studying partial evaluation in more depth.

The following summer, I was spending time in the US with my girlfriend (now my wife), who was there for a year as a French teaching assistant. Olivier was touring US universities and was scheduled to visit Paul Hudak at Yale University, quite close to where I was. I invited him to stay with us, and I reluctantly accepted his offer to accompany him to Yale. Looking back, I realize I had become very much like Olivier, completely passionate about my PhD work. When we met Paul Hudak, we introduced ourselves, and I, of course, spoke about my research field as a promising avenue in programming languages. I ended up taking a research position in Paul’s research group after completing my PhD.

When I started at Yale, driven by this strong enthusiasm, Olivier convinced me to co-found a symposium on Partial Evaluation and organize it at Yale University. Doing so required contacting various legendary figures in our research field. They all shared our excitement and committed to supporting our event.

During his time in the US, Olivier worked at a variety of places and collaborated with renowned researchers. He gained an in-depth understanding of what doing research truly entailed, in terms of methods and the skills needed to present and write about research results. We met many times during that period, and I greatly benefited from his experience; I had the privilege of testing ideas by confronting them with his insightful views. I was also fortunate to work with him on a number of research topics that emerged from our extensive conversations. That represented a fantastic research journey that materialized in five co-authored papers with two-digit numbers of citations and in three with three-digit numbers of citations. These research activities spanned a number of years, continuing even after I returned to France as a Professor of Computer Science.

In fact, the very beginning of our meeting is typical of Olivier’s impact on researchers, especially juniors. In retrospect, I see how much he has contributed to my career and how profoundly he was able to introduce me to major research topics, approaches, and methods.