Robin Milner

Arthur John Robin Gorell Milner Template:Postnominals (13 January 1934 – 20 March 2010) was a British computer scientist, and a Turing Award winner.<ref name="times">Obituary – Professor Robin Milner: computer scientistTemplate:Dead linkTemplate:Cbignore, The Times, 31 March 2010.</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/misc/obituaries/milner Cambridge University – Obituary</ref><ref>http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rm135/ Milner's Cambridge homepage</ref><ref name="acm">Template:ACMPortal</ref>

Life, education and career

Milner was born in Yealmpton, near Plymouth, England into a military family. He gained a King's Scholarship to Eton College in 1947, and was awarded the Tomline Prize (the highest prize in Mathematics at Eton) in 1952. Subsequently, he served in the Royal Engineers, attaining the rank of Second Lieutenant. He then enrolled at King's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1957.<ref>Interview with Robin Milner by Martin Berger.</ref> 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 eventually stepped down, although he was still at the laboratory. From 2009, Milner was a Scottish Informatics & Computer Science Alliance Advanced Research Fellow and held (part-time) the chair of computer science at the University of Edinburgh.

Milner died of a heart attack on 20 March 2010 in Cambridge.<ref name="times" /><ref>Newsgroup message informing on Milner's death.</ref> His wife, Lucy, died shortly before he did.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Contributions

Milner is generally regarded as having made three major contributions to computer science. He developed Logic for Computable Functions (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, type-safe exception handling, and an automatically inferred type system, using algorithm W. Milner also developed two theoretical frameworks for analyzing concurrent systems, the calculus of communicating systems (CCS), and its successor, the [[pi-calculus|Template:Pi-calculus]].

At the time of his death, he was working on bigraphs, a formalism for ubiquitous computing subsuming CCS and the Template:Pi-calculus.<ref name="bigraphs">Template:Cite web</ref> He is also credited for rediscovering the Hindley–Milner type system.

Honours and awards

He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1988. Milner received the ACM Turing Award in 1991. In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the ACM. In 2004, the Royal Society of Edinburgh awarded Milner with a Royal Medal for his "bringing about public benefits on a global scale". In 2008, he was elected a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Engineering for "fundamental contributions to computer science, including the development of LCF, ML, CCS, and the Template:Pi-calculus."[1]

The Royal Society Milner Award<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and the ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> are both named after him.

Selected publications

• A Calculus of Communicating Systems, Robin Milner. Springer-Verlag (LNCS 92), 1980. Template:ISBN
• Communication and Concurrency, Robin Milner. Prentice Hall International Series in Computer Science, 1989. Template:ISBN
• The Definition of Standard ML, Robin Milner, Mads Tofte, Robert Harper, MIT Press 1990
• Commentary on Standard ML, Robin Milner, Mads Tofte, MIT Press 1991. Template:ISBN
• The Definition of Standard ML (Revised), Robin Milner, Mads Tofte, Robert Harper, David MacQueen, MIT Press 1997. Template:ISBN
• Communicating and Mobile Systems: the Template:Pi-Calculus, Robin Milner. Cambridge University Press, 1999. Template:ISBN
• The Space and Motion of Communicating Agents, Robin Milner, Cambridge University Press, 2009. Template:ISBN

See also: Publications by Robin Milner in DBLP

Further reading

• An interview with Robin Milner, January 2010.
• Proof, Language, and Interaction: Essays in Honour of Robin Milner, edited by Gordon Plotkin, Colin Stirling and Mads Tofte. The MIT Press, 2000. Template:ISBN.
• The Royal Society of Edinburgh: Royal Gold Medals for Outstanding Achievement (2004 press release). http://www.royalsoced.org.uk/rse_press/2004/medals.htm
• A brief biography of and speech by Robin Milner
• A Brief Scientific Biography of Robin Milner (from Proof, Language, and Interaction: Essays in Honour of Robin Milner)

External links

• Address in Bologna, a short address by Milner on receiving Laurea Honoris Causa in computer science from the University of Bologna, summarising some of his main works, 9 July 1997
• Is informatics a science?, conference at École normale supérieure (Paris) (ENS), 10 December 2007