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Johannes Doerfert, a prominent contributor to the LLVM compiler project, died on September 17, 2026 after a battle with cancer, according to LLVM Foundation president Tanya Lattner. Doerfert earned his Ph.D. from Saarland University in 2018, had contributed to LLVM since 2014 and to the Polly polyhedral-optimization project since 2012, and later became LLVM's code owner for OpenMP target offloading in 2021.
A Smithsonian magazine special report examines how Benjamin Franklin repeatedly invented fictional authorial personas—such as the widow Silence Dogood and the unwed mother Polly Baker—to publish opinions he couldn't voice under his own name. As a teenager, Franklin used the Dogood persona to sneak past his brother's ban on printing his writing, while Polly Baker's fictional courtroom defense skewered unequal treatment of unmarried mothers versus the men who fathered their children.