from City College of New York in 1948, where along with fellow student Martin Davis he attended an honors mathematics class taught by Emil Post.
Ginsburg's professional career began in 1951 when he accepted a position as assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.
[2] He subsequently formed and led a research project dedicated to formal language theory and the foundations of Computer Science.
Members of the research group included: Sheila Greibach, Michael A. Harrison, Gene Rose, Ed Spanier, and Joe Ullian.
He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974 and spent the year touring the world, lecturing on the areas of theoretical Computer Science which he had helped to create.
He organized the first PODS (Symposium on Principles of Database Systems) in Marina del Rey in 1982 and was a moving force at the conference into the 1990s.
Beyond his contributions to Computer Science theory, he was remembered for the clarity of focus he brought to research and the seriousness with which he took his role as an advisor to PhD students.
Those who benefitted from Ginsburg's mentorship, who were not also his PhD students, included: Jonathan Goldstine, Sheila Greibach, Michael A. Harrison, Richard Hull, and Jeff Ullman.
[3] Many of his papers at this time were co-authored with other prominent formal language researchers, including Sheila Greibach, and Michael A. Harrison.
The culmination of this work was the creation of one of the deepest branches of Computer Science, Abstract Families of Languages, in collaboration with Sheila Greibach in 1967.