A brilliant NYU computer-science prof who had just become the father of twins jumped to his death last night from a 16th-floor balcony at his university-owned apartment, sources said.
Sam Roweis, 37, an associate professor in the school’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, died at 10:22 p.m.
His wife had recently given birth to preemie twins, the sources said.
“They were in some kind of argument over caring for them and all of a sudden, in the middle of the argument, he jumped over the 16th-floor balcony,” a source said.
An employee at 1 Washington Square Village — which houses mostly faculty members — said when the professor’s wife had came downstairs, “She lost it.”
The worker described the professor as “a very happy, happy guy.”
The university has suffered a number of tragic suicides in recent years. At the Bobst Library in 2003, two separate death leaps led to the installation of protective panels along the atrium’s railing.
Still, a student took his own life in the library last November.
“It’s a matter of great sorrow to us to lose one of our faculty members so abruptly,” said university spokesman John Beckman. “Our hearts go out to his family.”
Beckman would not disclose the name of the faculty member, but two knowledgeable sources confirmed it was Roweis.
Before coming to NYU in October, Roweis held an associate professorship in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.
His bio on the NYU Web site describes his interests as machine learning, data mining and statistical signal processing.
Roweis got his undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto and earned his doctorate in 1999 from the California Institute of Technology. He did postdoctoral work at the Gatsby Unit in London. He was at the University of Toronto from 2001 to 2009 and was a visiting faculty member at MIT in 2005.
He also worked at several industrial-research labs, including Google, Bell Labs, Whizbang! Labs and Microsoft.
He won several awards and held a Canada Research Chair in Statistical Machine Learning, a Sloan Research Fellowship and a Premier’s Research Excellence Award, and was a Scholar of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
With Tim Perone