Robin Milner

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Robin Milner
Born
Arthur John Robin Gorell Milner

(1934-01-13)13 January 1934
Yealmpton, Plymouth, England
Died20 March 2010(2010-03-20) (aged 76)
Cambridge, England
Known for
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
Institutions
Doctoral advisorNone, as Milner never did a PhD[2]
Doctoral studentsMads Tofte (1988)
Faron Moller
Chris Tofts
Davide Sangiorgi (1993)[3][4]

Arthur John Robin Gorell Milner FRS (13 January 1934 – 20 March 2010) was a British computer scientist, and a Turing Award winner.[5][6][7][8][9][10]

Life, education and career

Milner was born in

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.[5][11] His wife, Lucy, died shortly before he did.[12]

Contributions

Milner is generally regarded as having made three major contributions to

π-calculus
.

At the time of his death, he was working on

bigraphs, a formalism for ubiquitous computing subsuming CCS and the π-calculus.[13] He is also credited for rediscovering the Hindley–Milner type system
.

Honors 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 π-calculus."[1]

The Royal Society Milner Award[14] and the ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award[15] are both named after him.

Selected publications

See also: Publications by Robin Milner in DBLP

References

  1. doi:10.1145/151233.151240
    .
  2. ^ Interview with Robin Milner by Martin Berger.
  3. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.566460
    .
  4. ^ Robin Milner at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. ^ a b Obituary – Professor Robin Milner: computer scientist, The Times, 31 March 2010.
  6. doi:10.1145/1743546.1743556
    .
  7. S2CID 10413382
    .
  8. ^ http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/misc/obituaries/milner Cambridge University – Obituary
  9. ^ http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rm135/ Milner's Cambridge homepage
  10. ^ Robin Milner author profile page at the ACM Digital Library
  11. ^ Newsgroup message informing on Milner's death.
  12. ^ "Robin Milner: Pioneering computer scientist". The Independent. 14 April 2010.
  13. ^ Milner, Robin. "The Bigraphical Model". University of Cambridge. Retrieved 7 November 2009. Bigraphs [...] are proposed as a Ubiquitous Abstract Machine, playing the foundational role for ubiquitous computing that the von Neumann machine has played for sequential computing.
  14. ^ "The Royal Society Milner Award and Lecture | Royal Society". The Royal Society. Retrieved 12 May 2021.
  15. ^ "SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award". SIGPLAN. 2012.

Further reading

External links

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