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'Robin Milner' FRS (born 1934, Plymouth, England) is a prominent British computer scientist.

Contents

Life, education and career

Contributions

Honors and awards

References

External links

Life, education and career

Milner was born 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 1958, 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.

Contributions

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.

Honors and awards

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".

References

★ ''Proof, Language, and Interaction: Essays in Honour of Robin Milner'', edited by Gordon Plotkin, Colin Stirling and Mads Tofte. The MIT Press, 2000. ISBN 0-262-16188-5.

★ The Royal Society of Edinburgh: ''Royal Gold Medals for Outstanding Achievement'' (2004 press release). http://www.royalsoced.org.uk/rse_press/2004/medals.htm

External links

★ Milner's Cambridge homepage

★ An interview with Robin Milner by Martin Berger, 3 September 2003

★ A review of ''Proof, Language, and Interaction'', a book on computer science dedicated to Milner and covering many areas of his work

★ A brief biography of and speech by Robin Milner