Fields Computer Science | Role Computer scientist Name Robin Milner | |
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Institutions FerrantiCity University, LondonSwansea UniversityStanford UniversityUniversity of EdinburghUniversity of CambridgeAarhus University Doctoral advisor None, as Milner never did a PhD Doctoral students George MilneAvra CohnRaymond AubinMike SandersonAlan MycroftLuis DamasBrian MonahanKevin MitchellKim Larsen (1986)Mads Tofte (1988)K.V.S. Prasad (1989)Faron MollerDave BerryChris ToftsPeter SewellDavide Sangiorgi (1993)David N. Turner (1995)Alex MifsudJames J. Leifer (2001) Spouse Lucy Milner (m. 1963–2010) Books Communication and Concurrency, Communicating and Mobile Systems, The Definition of Standa, Edinburgh LCF, The Space and Motion of Comm Similar People Mads Tofte, Robert Harper, Steve Morrison, Alan Yarrow, James Lennox Dawson | ||
Gordon plotkin robin milner a craftsman of tools for the mind
Arthur John Robin Gorell Milner FRS FRSE (13 January 1934 – 20 March 2010), known as Robin Milner or A. J. R. G. Milner, was a British computer scientist, and a Turing Award winner.
Contents
- Gordon plotkin robin milner a craftsman of tools for the mind
- The work of robin milner proof language and interaction
- Life education and career
- Contributions
- Honors and awards
- Selected publications
- References
The work of robin milner proof language and interaction
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 eventually stepped down, although he was still at the laboratory. From 2009, Milner was a SICSA Advanced Research Fellow and held (part-time) the Chair of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh.
Milner died of a heart attack on 20 March 2010 in Cambridge. His wife, Lucy, died shortly before him.
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. At the time of his death, he was working on bigraphs, a formalism for ubiquitous computing subsuming CCS and the pi-calculus. He is also credited for rediscovering the Hindley–Milner type system.
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. In 2004, the Royal Society of Edinburgh awarded Milner with a Royal Medal for his "bringing about public benefits on a global scale". In 2008, he was elected a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Engineering for "fundamental contributions to computer science, including the development of LCF, ML, CCS, and the pi-calculus." [1]
Selected publications
See also: Publications by Robin Milner in DBLP