Evi Nemeth


Evi Nemeth was an engineer, author, and teacher known for her expertise in computer system administration and networks. She was the lead author of the "bibles" of system administration: UNIX System Administration Handbook, Linux Administration Handbook, and UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook. Evi Nemeth was known in technology circles as the matriarch of system administration.
Nemeth was best known in mathematical circles for originally identifying inadequacies in the "Diffie–Hellman problem", the basis for a large portion of modern network cryptography.

Career

Nemeth received her bachelor's degree in mathematics from Penn State in 1961 and her PhD in mathematics from the University of Waterloo, Ontario in 1971. She taught at Florida Atlantic University and the State University of New York at Utica before joining the computer science department at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1980. She served as manager of the college's computing facility from 1982 to 1986. She also was a visiting Associate Professor at Dartmouth College in 1990, and at UC San Diego in 1998, while on sabbatical from CU-Boulder.
While at CU-Boulder, Nemeth was well known for her undergraduate systems administration activity, in which students over the years had the opportunity to develop in-depth knowledge and skills in Unix system administration. Together with Steve Wozniak, Nemeth established the Woz scholarship program at CU-Boulder which funded inquisitive undergraduates for many years. Nemeth also had a special talent for inspiring and teaching young people. She mentored numerous middle- and high-school students, who worked with her to support computing in the college and came to be known as "the munchkins". She also mentored talented young undergraduates, taking them to national meetings where they installed networks and broadcast the meetings' sessions on the Internet on the multicast backbone. She coached the university's student programming teams in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.
From 1998 to 2006, Nemeth worked with Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis at the University of California, San Diego, on various Internet measurement and visualization projects.
Outside the United States, Nemeth helped bring Internet technology to the developing world through her involvement with programs of the Internet Society and the United Nations Development Programme.

Later life

After her retirement, Nemeth sailed her 40-foot sailboat Wonderland around various parts of the world, including a circuit of the Atlantic; the Panama Canal; and across the Pacific to New Zealand. She, along with the other crew aboard the vintage yacht Niña, disappeared en route between New Zealand and Australia, on June 4, 2013. On July 5, 2013, New Zealand authorities officially ended the search for the Niña, however relatives of the crew of Niña have continued to search.

Selected publications


"Early ethernet developers... objected to a roundoff error that exceeded the ARPANET's entire bandwidth, but marketing won out."
"Many people equate the word ‘daemon’ with the word ‘demon’, implying some kind of Satanic connection between Unix and the underworld. This is an egregious misunderstanding. ‘Daemon’ is actually a much older form of ‘demon’; daemons have no particular bias towards good or evil, but rather serve to help define a person's character or personality. The ancient Greeks' concept of a ‘personal daemon’ was similar to the modern concept of a ‘guardian angel’ – ‘eudaemonia’ is the state of being helped or protected by a kindly spirit. As a rule, Unix systems seem to be infested with both daemons and demons."