Robert C. Prim

Robert Clay Prim ( born 1921 in Sweetwater, Texas) is an American mathematician and computer scientist.

In 1941, he received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at Princeton University. During the Second World War he worked as an engineer at General Electric. In 1949 he received his Ph.D., also at Princeton University. From 1958 to 1961 he worked at Bell Laboratories, where he rediscovered the algorithm of Prim, which is used for computing a minimum spanning tree and was originally developed by Vojtěch Jarník.