Robin Milner

Robin Milner

Born	1934 Plymouth, England
Fields	Computer Science
Institutions	Ferranti City University, London Swansea University Stanford University University of Edinburgh University of Cambridge
Known for	LCF ML Calculus of communicating systems Pi-calculus
Notable awards	Turing Award

Robin Milner FRS (born 1934) is a prominent British computer scientist.

[edit] Life, education and career

Milner was born in 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.

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. 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".

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

v • d • e

Perlis (1966) · Wilkes (1967) · Hamming (1968) · Minsky (1969) · Wilkinson (1970) · McCarthy (1971) · Dijkstra (1972) · Bachman (1973) · Knuth (1974) · Newell / Simon (1975) · Rabin / Scott (1976) · Backus (1977) · Floyd (1978) · Iverson (1979) · Hoare (1980) · Codd (1981) · Cook (1982) · Thompson / Ritchie (1983) · Wirth (1984) · Karp (1985) · Hopcroft / Tarjan (1986) · Cocke (1987) · Sutherland (1988) · Kahan (1989) · Corbató (1990) · Milner (1991) · Lampson (1992) · Hartmanis / Stearns (1993) · Feigenbaum / Reddy (1994) · Blum (1995) · Pnueli (1996) · Engelbart (1997) · Gray (1998) · Brooks (1999) · Yao (2000) · Dahl / Nygaard (2001) · Rivest / Shamir / Adleman (2002) · Kay (2003) · Cerf / Kahn (2004) · Naur (2005) · Allen (2006) · Clarke / Emerson / Sifakis (2007)