Interview With Turing-Award Winner Robin Milner

Martin Berger writes "Turing Award (1991) winner Robin Milner is one of the most influential computer scientists. He may not be as well-known as he deserves to be, but his research contributions are ubiquitous: he developed the first mathematically sound yet practical tool for machine assisted proof construction. This research has been continued successfully and led to many useful proof assistants such as HOL, Coq or Isabelle that are being used heavily for verification purposes today." Read on for more information about Milner, and a link to Berger's excellent interview with him. Berger continues "There is also a direct line from this strand of Milner's work to what may be one of the hottest topics in computer science: proof carrying code. Milner also headed the effort to develop ML (best known today by its descendant Ocaml), the first language to include polymorphic type inference together with type-safe exception-handling and module mechanisms. Most modern programming languages can trace some of their advanced features directly back to ML's pioneering efforts. Most of all, he established concurrency theory as a scientific field by creating and studying idealised concurrent programming languages like the Pi-Calculus. That calculus is becoming more and more influential in the design of new programming languages (for example Microsoft's XLANG) and the WWW infrastructure. A few weeks ago, I interviewed Milner. I wanted to find out about the man and the stories behind all this great research. I hope you find it as interesting as I do. The transcript of the interview can be found here."

Comments

Re:Turing Award winner? Is this a mistake?!

[Jonathan]

The Turing Award has nothing to do with the Turing Test. It's just an award given by a major computer science association (the ACM) to people that they consider to have significantly advanced the field.

http://www.acm.org/awards/taward.html

Re:turing

[vbweenie]

Or how's about John Maynard Keynes, the economist? Anthony Burgess' _Earthly Powers_ has a very funny running joke about how many of the greatest and most serious thinkers of the twentieth century were gay (or non-straight, in any one of a number of ways).

An excellent biography of Turing that explicitly deals with the significance of his sexual outlaw status is Andrew Hodges' Alan Turing: The Enigma. Makes one think of the expression "the backroom boys" in an altogether different way.

I don't think that Turing wanted to be a "sexual outlaw", by the way - obviously he'd have preferred it if the authorities had simply left him alone - but there is a subversive, anti-authoritarian streak in him which has some of its roots in the British gay culture of his times. An often overlooked aspect of the Turing Test is the stipulation that the human participants must also pretend to be something they're not - namely a member of the opposite sex...