Gordon Plotkin

Gordon Plotkin

At the MFCS 2005 conference
Born Gordon David Plotkin
9 September 1946[1]
Glasgow
Residence Scotland
Nationality British
Fields Logic
Computer science
Mathematics
Institutions University of Edinburgh
Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science
School of Informatics
University of Glasgow
Alma mater University of Glasgow (BSc)
University of Edinburgh (PhD)
Thesis Automatic methods of inductive inference (1972)
Doctoral advisor
Doctoral students
Known for Programming Computable Functions
Unbounded nondeterminism
Operational semantics
Domain theory
Notable awards
Website
homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/gdp
inf.ed.ac.uk/people/staff/Gordon_Plotkin.html

Gordon David Plotkin, FRS, FRSE (born 9 September 1946) is a theoretical computer scientist in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Plotkin is probably best known for his introduction of structural operational semantics (SOS) and his work on denotational semantics. In particular, his notes on A Structural Approach to Operational Semantics were very influential. He has contributed to many other areas of computer science.[15][16][17][18][19][20][21]

Education

Plotkin was educated at the University of Glasgow and the University of Edinburgh, gaining his Bachelor of Science degree in 1967[1] and PhD in 1972[3] supervised by Rod Burstall[2] and Donald Michie.[3]

Career

Plotkin has remained at Edinburgh, and was, with Burstall and Robin Milner, a co-founder of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science (LFCS).[22][23][24][25]

Awards and honours

Plotkin was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1992, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Member of the Academia Europæa. He is also a winner of the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. Plotkin received the 2012 Royal Society Milner Award for "his fundamental research into programming semantics with lasting impact on both the principles and design of programming languages."[26]

His nomination for the Royal Society reads:

“ Plotkin has contributed to Artificial Intelligence, Logic, Linguistics and especially to Computer Science. In AI he worked on hypothesis-formation and universal unification; in Logic, on frameworks for arbitrary logics; in Linguistics, on formalising situation theory.

His main general contribution has been to establish a semantic framework for Computer Science, especially programming languages. Particular significant results are in the lambda-calculus (elementary models, definability, call-by-value), non-determinism (powerdomain theory), semantic formalisms (structured operational semantics, metalanguages), and categories of semantic domains (coherent, pro-finite, concrete). Further contributions concern the semantic paradigm of full abstraction, concurrency theory (event structures), programming logic and type theory.[14]

 ”

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "PLOTKIN, Prof. Gordon David". Who's Who 2013, A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 2013; online edn, Oxford University Press.(subscription required)
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Gordon Plotkin at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Plotkin, Gordon David (1972). Automatic methods of inductive inference (PhD thesis). University of Edinburgh.
  4. ↑ Cardelli, Luca (1982). An algebraic approach to hardware description and verification (PhD thesis). University of Edinburgh.
  5. ↑ Fiore, Marcelo (1994). Axiomatic domain theory in categories of partial maps (PhD thesis). University of Edinburgh.
  6. ↑ Hofmann, Martin (1995). Extensional concepts in intensional type theory (PhD thesis). University of Edinburgh.
  7. ↑ Longley, John R. (1995). Realizability toposes and language semantics (PhD thesis). University of Edinburgh.
  8. ↑ Denney, Ewen (1999). A theory of program refinement (PhD thesis). University of Edinburgh.
  9. ↑ Moggi, Eugenio (1999). The partial lambda calculus (PhD thesis). University of Edinburgh.
  10. ↑ Mousavi, Mohammad Reza (2005). Structuring structural operational semantics (PhD thesis). Eindhoven University of Technology.
  11. ↑ Pederson, Michael (2010). Modular languages for systems and synthetic biology (PhD thesis). University of Edinburgh.
  12. ↑ Wèi, Lǐ (1983). An operational approach to semantics and translation for programming languages (PhD thesis).
  13. ↑ Winskel, Glynn (1980). Events in Computation (PhD thesis).
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 "EC/1992/29: Plotkin, Gordon David". London: The Royal Society. Archived from the original on 16 April 2014.
  15. ↑ Gordon Plotkin's publications indexed by Google Scholar, a free service provided by Google
  16. ↑ Gordon Plotkin from the ACM Portal
  17. ↑ Gordon Plotkin's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database, a service provided by Elsevier.
  18. ↑ Gordon Plotkin's publications indexed by the DBLP Bibliography Server at the University of Trier
  19. ↑ Mitchell, J. C.; Plotkin, G. D. (1988). "Abstract types have existential type". ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems 10 (3): 470. doi:10.1145/44501.45065.
  20. ↑ Abadi, M. N.; Burrows, M.; Lampson, B.; Plotkin, G. (1993). "A calculus for access control in distributed systems". ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems 15 (4): 706. doi:10.1145/155183.155225.
  21. ↑ List of publications from Microsoft Academic Search
  22. ↑ Plotkin, G. D. (1975). "Call-by-name, call-by-value and the λ-calculus". Theoretical Computer Science 1 (2): 125. doi:10.1016/0304-3975(75)90017-1.
  23. ↑ Plotkin, G. D. (2004). "The origins of structural operational semantics". The Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming. 60-61: 3. doi:10.1016/j.jlap.2004.03.009.
  24. ↑ A Structural Approach to Operational Semantics by G.D. Plotkin (1981)
  25. ↑ Program Verification and Semantics: Further Work (2004)
  26. ↑ Royal Society Milner Award

External links