Robin Milner

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Robin Milner is a prominent British computer scientist.

Graduating from King's College, Cambridge in 1952, 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. 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.

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.

He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1988 and received the ACM Turing Award in 1991.

[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.

[edit] External links

• Milner's Cambridge homepage
• 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
• A brief biography of and speech by Robin Milner