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MIT Professor Is Fatally Shot in His Home (nytimes.com)
65 points by donohoe 8 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 25 comments





Let's hope not another troubled and struggling math graduate:

Murder of Karel de Leeuw - Wikipedia

Murder of Karel de Leeuw Theodore Landon "Ted" Streleski (born 1936), an American former graduate student in mathematics at Stanford University, murdered his former faculty advisor, Professor Karel de Leeuw, with a ball-peen hammer on August 18, 1978.


Not sure what we should we make of this. Besides the tragedy of losing a human being and a scientist, is this significant in another way?

I'm not sure people outside of Greater Boston would care, but those of us who do live there probably find it exceedingly strange that this occurred in Brookline of all places.

This was headline news in Poland

Nothing yet, but the timing is oddly coincidental to the shooting that occurred a Brown University a few days ago. Probably nothing there but who knows.

Reuters (partially) confirms it [0]

> Foley, the top prosecutor in Boston, said at a press conference that investigators were certain Valente "murdered MIT professor Nuno Loureiro" on Monday, saying that prosecutors have ample evidence linking him to the crime.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/police-probe-links-between-...



We have no info but he was the department head of the MIT PSFC. It's easy to imagine a deranged individual picking a high profile target by browsing MIT's website. Or it was a domestic dispute or road rage or any number of things that would drive someone to shoot someone in their home.

We have no information and can only speculate.


Looking at a map and and it seems relatively close to Brown(i'm not American , maybe these are very far apart when you are actually there), and that shooter hasn't been caught.

Providence is about an hour drive away from where I'm at in Greater Boston, less so if your in the city.

From MIT: Nuno Loureiro, professor and director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, dies at 47 https://news.mit.edu/2025/nuno-loureiro-professor-director-p...

If any entity had a goal to hamstring research progress in America and get away with it, due to it being unnoticeable in the sea of regular shootings and political upheavals, there would be no better time to do so.

it's the best time for all manner of crimes in fact. It's so sad what a small cabal of lunatics can do.

[flagged]


what is the point of idle speculation like this?

The point of this user's sole comment on HN is to imply that Israel is nefarious and that anyome working with Israel may be targeted for assassination (regardless that there's no indication this person was).

I don't think this post should be flagged or removed. There should be a separate classification for nation-state trollbots promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories.


Killing a non-military scientist has no moral justification. I didn't have any ill intentions; I wanted to find the reason. However, updating news update answered my questions. Don't try to get your interpretation from my mouth.

>> Killing a non-military scientist has no moral justification

No one said it did.

You transparently attempted to create a completely unrelated conspiracy theory by involving Israel in a civilian scientist's murder. Something we know Israel had absolutely nothing to do with.

You could have asked whether he had connections to Iran or China, or Tesla or General Motors. You didn't just randomly pick Israel because you "wanted to find a reason."

Let me suggest that if your attempt to find a reason for everything begins and ends with Israel, you may be an antisemite. Scratch that, you are one. And your question didn't age well. And your self-professed interest in finding a reason doesn't hold up to the slightest scrutiny, either.

1/5 stars for a very weak attempt at agitprop on behalf of whoever sent you to write it.


Who the hell are you? You are not in a position to educate me, but I am happy to see that I am wasting $7,000 per post based on the Hasbara project. Continue trolling, I enjoy seeing that money is getting wasted :-)

A few days ago one of the top HN posts was a antisemitic conspiracy cesspool so I'm afraid we're long past that point.

Which?


Guh. Thanks. I'm glad my phone is down to 2% battery and I don't have the energy to go through all that tonight.

no. he was Portuguese and simply a brilliant scientist.

"Plasma physicist Nuno Loureiro was helping to develop clean-energy fusion devices."

Big oil says no.




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