Carl Smith was a professor at the University of Maryland from 1980 until his untimely death from brain cancer in 2004. He worked in the field of inductive inference and is considered a pioneer of computational complexity theory and computational learning theory. He organized the first conferences on computational learning in the US in the 1980's.
Carl earned his PhD from the State University of Buffalo in 1979, and received a Habilitation degree from the University of Latvia in 1993. He was a member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences.
Carl was the author of the textbooks "Theory of Computation: A Gentle Introduction" and "A Recursive Introduction to the Theory of Computation."