Dear Lopatin family –
Please accept my most sincere and deepest sympathies for your loss. Amir is a friend and fellow PhD student of mine at Stanford, and I can say without hesitation that his contributions to our community will be missed immensely. I took several courses this year with Amir, and you could always count on him to make a strong impression–he was more willing than anyone else to question or challenge the ideas that were presented to him. I really respected him for that. Amir and I also worked on the same project for our research appointments, and so I had the opportunity to see the results of several of his projects and assignment. Amir was a very talented programmer, and a real visionary when it came to ways in which technology could be used to enhance education. The close proximity of our workspaces meant that Amir and I saw quite a bit of each other, even late at night and on the weekends. I grew quite fond of his sharp humor and the fact that he always walked around with a mischievous smile on his face–even if he didn’t know people were watching him. He took great pleasure in the social events that our first-year cohort of students participated in, and he seemed to establish many friendships in a relatively short period of time. We are all very saddened and distraught by this news. I hope that you will take some comfort in knowing that there is a great number of people on this side of the country that will miss Amir greatly, and that he will be remembered fondly for a long time to come.
–Robb Lindgren, LSTD doctoral student