Vaughan Pratt

Vaughan Pratt (born April 12, 1944) is a

Pratt was an assistant professor at MIT (1972 to 1976) and then associate professor (1976 to 1982). In 1974, working in collaboration with Knuth and James H. Morris, Pratt completed and formalized work he had begun in 1970 as a graduate student at Berkeley; the coauthored result was the Knuth–Morris–Pratt pattern matching algorithm. In 1976, he developed the system of dynamic logic, a modal logic of structured behavior.

He went on sabbatical from MIT to Stanford (1980 to 1981), and was appointed a full professor at Stanford in 1981.

Pratt directed the SUN workstation project at Stanford from 1980 to 1982. He contributed in various ways to the founding and early operation of Sun Microsystems, acting in the role of consultant for its first year, then, taking a leave of absence from Stanford for the next two years, becoming director of research, and finally resuming his role as a consultant to Sun and returning to Stanford in 1985.

He also designed the Sun Microsystems logo,^[2] which features four interleaved copies of the word "sun"; it is an ambigram.

Pratt became professor emeritus at Stanford in 2000.

Major contributions

A number of well-known algorithms bear Pratt's name.

In 1999, Pratt built the world's smallest (at the time) web server—it was the size of a matchbox.[10]^[11]

Other contributions

Pratt was credited in a 1995

Today Pratt has a wide influence. In addition to his Stanford professorship, he holds membership in at least seven professional organizations. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and is on the editorial board of three major mathematics journals. He was also the founder, chairman, and CTO of TIQIT Computers, Inc. for the ten years prior to when it closed its doors in 2010.

References