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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."
ahhh that feels so much better!
I always wondered what "Officer Pete Malloy" from Emergency! was doing. I wonder if Randolph Mantooth and Kevin Tighe can pass the Turing test?
rm@dcs.ed.ac.uk
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It's the day before a holiday
Unless you're from Canada, in which case the holiday is done and gone -- mostly because Canadians are much more advanced than you grunting, oafish Americans.
Why is this flamebait? Turing *was* gay.
I can't believe this news is real. Its perfect timing though because I just finished up a report, I am studying this. This amazes me because I could not find any person on earth who has passed the Turing Award, by designing an OS that could trick people into thinking it was a person, and not computer hardware. In actuality (if we believe this news) it happened over 12 years ago and nobody has done it since. Sounds like this guy knows his stuff. Anybody else pass the Turing Award since? Anyone?
click here to incinerate homeless people
Great.
I'd rather go to the suez canal (when it was controlled by the british) than the love canal
See you soon Dad. I look forward to the anal sex.
Yah, he killed himself because of persecution by the British authorities. Wonder why it's considered bad to point it out.. I'd always hoped that homosexuals would mention people like Turing more often than just the same old run of the mill "creative, artistic writer, singer, actor types" If I was gay, I'd be annoyed by the prevailing homo-stereotypes.. eg 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy' (variations on flaming queen to touchy feely style maven) or well.. nevermind.. I just find it odd that you never hear it mentioned that Turing or Hardy (well, they could claim him.. since he seemingly wasn't heterosexual) or any number of scientist who weren't openly gay.. (but "might" have been.. oh well, we shall never know)
p
If I were gay, I would at least use proper English. Speaking with a lisp is bad enough without sounding like a dumbass.