Melvin Earl "Bill" Maron (Jan 23, 1924 - September 28, 2016) was an American computer scientist and emeritis professor of

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

. He studied mechanical engineering and physics at the University of Nebraska and received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California in 1951. Maron is best known for his work on probabilistic

information retrieval Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an Information needs, information need. The information need can be specified in the form ...

which he published together with his friend and colleague Lary Kuhns. Quite remarkably, Maron also pioneered relational databases, proposing a system called the Relational Data File in 1967, on which Ted Codd based his

Relational model The relational model (RM) is an approach to managing data using a structure and language consistent with first-order predicate logic, first described in 1969 by English computer scientist Edgar F. Codd, where all data are represented in terms of t ...

of data.

References

University of California, Berkeley School of Information faculty American computer scientists 1924 births 2016 deaths University of Nebraska alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni {{US-academic-scientist-stub