Michael J C Gordon

Michael John Caldwell "Mike" Gordon FRS (28 February 1948 – 22 August 2017) was a British computer scientist.

Mike Gordon led the development of the HOL theorem prover. The HOL system is an environment for interactive theorem proving in a higher-order logic. Its most outstanding feature is its high degree of programmability through the meta-language ML. The system has a wide variety of uses, from formalising pure mathematics to verification of industrial hardware.

There has been a series of international conferences on the HOL system, TPHOLs. The first three were informal users' meetings with no published proceedings. The tradition now is for an annual conference in a continent different from the location of the previous meeting. From 1996, the scope broadened to cover all theorem proving in higher-order logics.

Gordon was born in Ripon, Yorkshire, England. He gained his Ph.D. at University of Edinburgh in 1973 with a thesis entitled Evaluation and Denotation of Pure LISP Programs. He had worked at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory since 1981, initially as a Lecturer and moving to Reader in 1988 and Professor in 1996. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1994, and in 2008 a two-day research meeting on Tools and Techniques for Verification of System Infrastructure was held there in honour of his 60th birthday. He died in Cambridge after a brief illness and is survived by his wife and two sons.