Ronald V. Book

Ronald Vernon Book ( born March 5, 1937 † 28 May 1997 Santa Barbara, California ) was an American computer scientist.

Life

Ronald Vernon Book grew up in a farming family operated. He attended Grinnell College, a higher private school in Grinnell, Iowa, and received his BA 1958 financial statements. At Wesleyan University, a private university in Middletown, Connecticut, he studied mathematics and in 1960 was awarded an MA and in 1964 a second M. A. Subsequently, he began his first research at Harvard University under the guidance of Sheila A. Greibach. He received his Ph.D. 1969 ( dissertation: Grammars with Time Functions) for Ph. D. In 1970 he published with Greibach work: Quasi -realtime languages ​​(see also quasi- real-time languages ​​, which is the complexity class Q).

Book was set at Harvard and moved to Yale later. In 1971 he met the French scientist Maurice Nivat on a sort of Summer School for Formal Languages ​​at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario know. Nivat was very impressed by Books Art Both remained on friendly terms.

In 1972, Ron Book published two works: In On languages ​​accepted in polynomial time he separated different Polynomialzeitklassen and in formal language theory Topics in he set actively edited and central topics of formal languages ​​dar.

In 1977, Ron Book was appointed at the Institute of Mathematics at the University of California at Santa Barbara ( UCSB ) professor. He began another theme in his investigations mitaufzunehmen: rewriting systems ( engl.: string - rewriting systems). So created numerous works in the eighties.

Ronald Book died of multiple sclerosis. His wife Celia Wrathall has been known by several studies in theoretical computer science ( see, for example Polynomialzeithierarchie ).

Review

Robert McNaughton believes that Ron Book at this time the work on rewriting systems wrote that had the biggest scientific impact in this topic. In 1993, he co-wrote with Friedrich Otto the Book of string rewriting systems. In this, the most important results are summarized on rewriting systems.

On the other hand he gave of complexity theory, several new impetus, as he led, for example, a sparse set the terms and tally language in complexity theory. Many researchers applied these technologies to the P- NP problem. These works convey today a deep insight into the difficulty of this problem. Furthermore, he examined and refined the relativization terms of complexity theory.

Ding Zhu Du and Keri -I Ko report about him is that he has given in the eighties with his ideas to the application of the Kolmogorov complexity of the scientific community very important impulses.

This strong effect has been substantially influenced by the fact that he has worked intensively with many scientists. So he has (mostly postdoctoral students) received regular guests in Santa Barbara. Some of them were Humboldt Research Fellows from Germany and are bekennte scientists such as Friedrich Otto and Uwe Schöning today.

For his achievements, he was awarded the early 1990s with the Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This price was that long to him a research stay in Germany was funded for one year.

Scientific engagement

Ron Book has published over 150 articles in international scientific journals.

He was also editor of three different monograph series on computer science.

Regularly he was represented in one of the following conferences as chair or as a program committee member:

  • STOC (Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing )
  • FOCS ( IEEE Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science)
  • ICALP (International Colloquium on Automata, Languages ​​and Programming sponsored by the European Association of Theoretical Computer Science)
  • MFCS (International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science)

PhD

In Ron Book hold a PhD:

  • Brenda Baker, Harvard University, 1973
  • Ding Zhu Du, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1985
  • Colm O'Dunlaing, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1981
  • Luquan Pan, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1986
  • David Russo, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1985
May 28 Middletown (Connecticut) London (Ontario) Association for Computing Machinery Mathematics Genealogy Project Integrated Authority File
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