Robert W. Floyd
Robert " Bob " W Floyd ( born June 8, 1936 in New York City; † 25 September 2001 in Stanford, California ) was an American computer scientist and Turing Award winner. He dropped the "W " to change his original middle name, but he stressed many times that " W. " is a valid abbreviation for this is.
Life
Floyd was born in 1936 in New York City and detected with six years as a child prodigy. He skipped three classes and finished school at age 14 at the University of Chicago, he received a scholarship in 1953 (ie 17 years ) a bachelor's degree in liberal arts, he received in 1958 a second bachelor's degree in physics.
Already during his studies he was computer operator and programmer later at the Illinois Institute of Technology. In 1959 he began a number of notable articles in computer journals to publish ( Donald E. Knuth: "When I collected 1966 material for a monograph on the subject of parsing, I came to the conclusion that until then only five really good papers have been written on the compiler were, and Bob was the author of all five "). In 1962, he was Senior Project Scientist at Computer Associates.
In 1965 he was appointed associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University and came into the editorial advisory board of the Journal of the ACM. In 1968 he went to Stanford University where he received a full professorship in 1970 and from 1973 to 1975 headed the faculty of computer science. He reached that position without a PhD. A year spent Floyd also at the Naval Postgraduate School. In 1994, he went into retirement. At Floyds PhD student include the later Turing Award winner Robert Tarjan and Ronald L. Rivest.
His contributions include efficient algorithms for finding all shortest paths in a graph (algorithm of Floyd and Warshall ), for parsing and image processing ( Floyd - Steinberg algorithm ), and the discovery of Bottom Up Heapsort. But its probably the most important achievement was his pioneering work in the field of program verification using logical assertions in his 1967 article published Assigning Meanings to Programs. This was an important contribution, which led to the Hoare calculus later.
Floyd worked closely with Donald E. Knuth. He was the chief reviewer for Knuth's groundbreaking book, The Art of Computer Programming, and he is the one who is quoted in this work most often.
Floyd received the 1978 Turing Award for his influence on the methods to generate efficient and reliable software and for his contribution to the establishment of the following areas of computer science: theory of parsing, semantics of programming languages , automatic program verification, automatic program synthesis and analysis of algorithms. In addition, he received, among other things, the 1991 IEEE Computer Pioneer Award and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the ACM.
Floyd was married twice (most recently with the computer scientist Christiane Floyd ) and had three sons and a daughter. In 2001 he died of Pick's disease.
Writings
- A descriptive language for symbol manipulation. In 1961.
- Syntactic analysis and operator precedence. In 1963.
- The syntax of programming languages - A survey. In 1964.
- Assigning Meaning to Programs. (PDF, 668 kB) Add: Jacob T. Schwartz ( ed.): Proceedings of the Symposium on Applied Mathematics. Vol 19, American Mathematical Society, 1967, pp. 19-32.
- Richard Beigel: The language of machines. Computer Science Press, 1994 ( German The language of machines. International Thomson Publishing, Bonn, 1996, ISBN 3-8266-0216-1 ).