John C. Reynolds

John C. Reynolds
John C. Reynolds
	Lovelace Medal (2010)
	Scientific career
Fields	Computer scientist
Institutions	Syracuse University; Carnegie Mellon University
Thesis	Surface Properties of Nuclear Matter (1961)
Doctoral students	Benjamin C. Pierce
Website	www.cs.cmu.edu/~jcr

John Charles Reynolds (June 1, 1935 – April 28, 2013) was an American computer scientist.^[1]

Education and affiliations

John Reynolds studied at Purdue University and then earned a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in theoretical physics from Harvard University in 1961. He was a professor of information science at Syracuse University from 1970 to 1986. From then until his death, he was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. He also held visiting positions at Aarhus University (Denmark), The University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London, Microsoft Research (Cambridge, UK) and Queen Mary University of London.

Academic work

Reynolds's main research interest was in the area of

polymorphic lambda calculus (System F) and formulated the property of semantic parametricity; the same calculus was independently discovered by Jean-Yves Girard. He wrote a seminal paper on definitional interpreters, which clarified early work on continuations and introduced the technique of defunctionalization. He applied category theory to programming language semantics. He defined the programming languages Gedanken and Forsythe, known for their use of intersection types. He worked on a separation logic to describe and reason about shared mutable data structures

.

Reynolds created an elegant, idealized formulation of the programming language

call-by-value languages such as ML. The conceptual integrity of the language made it one of the main objects of semantic research, along with Programming Computable Functions (PCF) and ML.^[2]

He was an editor of journals such as the

Lovelace Medal from the British Computer Society

in 2010.

Selected publications

Books

The Craft of Programming,
ISBN 0-13-188862-5
.

Theories of Programming Languages,
ISBN 0-521-59414-6
.

Articles

"Transformational Systems and the Algebraic Structure of Atomic Formulas" (PDF). Machine Intelligence. 5: 135–151. 1970.

"Towards a Theory of Type Structure" (PDF). Colloque sur la Programmation. Paris, France. 1974. pp. 408–425.
doi:10.1007/3-540-06859-7_148
. Retrieved 2014-11-06.

"Types, Abstraction and Parametric Polymorphism" (PDF). Information Processing '83. 1983. pp. 513–523. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-10. Retrieved 2014-11-06.

"Separation Logic: A Logic for Shared Mutable Data Structures" (PDF). 17th IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS 2002). pp. 55–74.
doi:10.1109/LICS.2002.1029817
.

References

^ Fisher, Larry (29 April 2013). "John Reynolds, 1935–2013". Communications of the ACM: ACM News. United States: Association for Computing Machinery. Retrieved 30 April 2013.

S2CID 6273486
.

Further reading

doi:10.1016/j.tcs.2006.12.024

Stephen Brookes,
doi:10.1145/2535838.2537851

External links

Official website

Curriculum Vitae

John C. Reynolds at DBLP Bibliography Server

John C. Reynolds at the Mathematics Genealogy Project

Program Verification and Semantics: Further Work (London, 2004)

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_C._Reynolds&oldid=1218724697"

[1] Fisher, Larry (29 April 2013). "John Reynolds, 1935–2013". Communications of the ACM: ACM News. United States: Association for Computing Machinery. Retrieved 30 April 2013.

[2] S2CID 6273486
.

[1]

[2]