Robin Milner
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Robin Milner | |
| Born | 1934 Plymouth, England |
|---|---|
| Fields | Computer Science |
| Institutions | Ferranti City University, London Swansea University Stanford University University of Edinburgh University of Cambridge |
| Doctoral advisor | None, as Milner never did a PhD[1] |
| Doctoral students | George Milne Avra Cohn Raymond Aubin Mike Sanderson Alan Mycroft Luis Damas Brian Monahan Kevin Mitchell Kim Larsen (1986) Mads Tofte (1988) K.V.S. Prasad (1989) Faron Moller Dave Berry Chris Tofts Peter Sewell Davide Sangiorgi (1993) David N. Turner (1995) Alex Mifsud James J. Leifer (2001) |
| Known for | LCF ML Calculus of communicating systems Pi-calculus |
| Notable awards | Turing Award |
Arthur John Robin Gorell Milner FRS FRSE (Robin Milner or A.J.R.G. Milner, born 13 January 1934 near Plymouth) is a prominent British computer scientist.
Contents |
[edit] Life, education and career
Milner was born in Yealmpton, near Plymouth, England into a military family. He was awarded a scholarship to Eton College in 1947, and subsequently served in the Royal Engineers, attaining the rank of Second Lieutenant. He then enrolled at King's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1957, Milner first worked as a schoolteacher then as a programmer at Ferranti, before entering academia at City University, London, then Swansea University, Stanford University, and from 1973 at the University of Edinburgh, where he was a co-founder of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science (LFCS). He returned to Cambridge as the head of the Computer Laboratory in 1995 from which he has subsequently stepped down although he is still at the laboratory.
[edit] Contributions
Milner is generally regarded as having made three major contributions to computer science. He developed LCF, one of the first tools for automated theorem proving. The language he developed for LCF, ML, was the first language with polymorphic type inference and type-safe exception handling. In a very different area, Milner also developed a theoretical framework for analyzing concurrent systems, the calculus of communicating systems (CCS), and its successor, the pi-calculus.
[edit] Honors and awards
He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1988 and received the ACM Turing Award in 1991. In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the ACM and in 2004 the Royal Society of Edinburgh awarded Milner with a Royal Medal for his "bringing about public benefits on a global scale".
[edit] Selected Publications
- A calculus of communicating systems, Robin Milner. Springer (LNCS 92), 1980. ISBN 3-540-10235-3
- Communication and Concurrency, Robin Milner. Prentice Hall (International Series in Computer Science), 1989. ISBN 0-131-15007-3
- The Definition of Standard ML, Robin Milner, Mads Tofte, Robert Harper, MIT Press 1990
- The Definition of Standard ML (Revised), Robin Milner, Mads Tofte, Robert Harper, David MacQueen, MIT Press 1997. ISBN 0-262-63181-4
- Commentary on Standard ML, Robin Milner, Mads Tofte, MIT Press 1997. ISBN 0-262-63137-7
- Communicating and Mobile Systems: the Pi-Calculus, Robin Milner. Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-521-65869-1
[edit] References
- Proof, Language, and Interaction: Essays in Honour of Robin Milner, edited by Gordon Plotkin, Colin Stirling and Mads Tofte. The MIT Press, 2000. ISBN 0-262-16188-5.
- The Royal Society of Edinburgh: Royal Gold Medals for Outstanding Achievement (2004 press release). http://www.royalsoced.org.uk/rse_press/2004/medals.htm
- A brief biography of and speech by Robin Milner
[edit] External links
- Milner's Cambridge homepage
- Address in Bologna, a short address by Milner on receiving Laurea Honoris Causa in Computer Science from the University of Bologna, summarising some of his main works, 9 July 1997
- An interview with Robin Milner by Martin Berger, 3 September 2003
- A review of Proof, Language, and Interaction, a book on computer science dedicated to Milner and covering many areas of his work
- Is informatics a science?, conference at ENS, 10 December 2007
|
|||||
