Rodney Martineau "Rod" Burstall

FRSE Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and letters, judged to be "eminently distinguished in their subject". This so ...

(born 1934) is a British

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus ( ...

and one of four founders of the

Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science The Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science (LFCS) is a research institute within the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland. It was founded in 1987 and is a community of theoretical computer scientists with in ...

at the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

Biography

Burstall studied physics at the

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

, then an

M.Sc. A Master of Science ( la, Magisterii Scientiae; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree in the field of science awarded by universities in many countries or a person holding such a degree. In contrast to ...

operational research Operations research ( en-GB, operational research) (U.S. Air Force Specialty Code: Operations Analysis), often shortened to the initialism OR, is a discipline that deals with the development and application of analytical methods to improve decis ...

Birmingham University The University of Birmingham (informally Birmingham University) is a Public university, public research university located in Edgbaston, Birmingham, United Kingdom. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Queen's College, Birmingha ...

. He worked for three years before returning to Birmingham University to earn a

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

in 1966 with thesis titled ''Heuristic and Decision Tree Methods on Computers: Some Operational Research Applications'' under the supervision of N. A. Dudley and K. B. Haley. Burstall was an early and influential proponent of

functional programming In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by applying and composing functions. It is a declarative programming paradigm in which function definitions are trees of expressions that ...

pattern matching In computer science, pattern matching is the act of checking a given sequence of tokens for the presence of the constituents of some pattern. In contrast to pattern recognition, the match usually has to be exact: "either it will or will not be ...

, and

list comprehension A list comprehension is a syntactic construct available in some programming languages for creating a list based on existing lists. It follows the form of the mathematical ''set-builder notation'' (''set comprehension'') as distinct from the use of ...

, and is known for his work with

Robin Popplestone Robin John Popplestone (9 December 1938 in Bristol – 14 April 2004 in Glasgow) was a pioneer in the fields of machine intelligence and robotics. He is known for developing the COWSEL and POP programming languages, and for his work on Freddy ...

POP Pop or POP may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Music * Pop music, a musical genre Artists * POP, a Japanese idol group now known as Gang Parade * Pop!, a UK pop group * Pop! featuring Angie Hart, an Australian band Albums * ''Pop'' (G ...

, an innovative programming language developed at

Edinburgh Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian ...

around 1970, and later work with

John Darlington John Darlington is a British academic, researcher and author. He is an Emeritus Professor at Imperial College London. He was Director of the London e-Science Centre and was head of the Functional Programming and Social Computing Sections at Imper ...

on NPL and

program transformation A program transformation is any operation that takes a computer program and generates another program. In many cases the transformed program is required to be semantically equivalent to the original, relative to a particular formal semantics and ...

and with

David MacQueen David (; , "beloved one") (traditional spelling), , ''Dāwūd''; grc-koi, Δαυΐδ, Dauíd; la, Davidus, David; gez , ዳዊት, ''Dawit''; xcl, Դաւիթ, ''Dawitʿ''; cu, Давíдъ, ''Davidŭ''; possibly meaning "beloved one". w ...

and Don Sannella on

Hope Hope is an optimistic state of mind that is based on an expectation of positive outcomes with respect to events and circumstances in one's life or the world at large. As a verb, its definitions include: "expect with confidence" and "to cherish ...

, a precursor to

Standard ML Standard ML (SML) is a general-purpose, modular, functional programming language with compile-time type checking and type inference. It is popular among compiler writers and programming language researchers, as well as in the development of ...

, Miranda, and

Haskell Haskell () is a general-purpose, statically-typed, purely functional programming language with type inference and lazy evaluation. Designed for teaching, research and industrial applications, Haskell has pioneered a number of programming lan ...

. In 1995, he was elected a Fellow of the

Royal Society of Edinburgh The Royal Society of Edinburgh is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity that operates on a wholly independent and non-partisan basis and provides public benefit throughout Scotland. It was established i ...

. Burstall retired in 2000, becoming Professor Emeritus. In 2002 David Rydeheard and Don Sannella assembled a

festschrift In academia, a ''Festschrift'' (; plural, ''Festschriften'' ) is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during their lifetime. It generally takes the form of an edited volume, containing contributions from the ...

for Rod Burstall that was published in

Formal Aspects of Computing ''Formal Aspects of Computing'' (''FAOC'') is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Springer Science+Business Media, covering the area of formal methods and associated topics in computer science. The editors-in-chief are Jim Woodcock and ...

.D. Rydeheard & Don Sannella (July 2002) "A Collection of Papers and Memoirs Celebrating the Contribution of Rod Burstall to Advances in Computer Science",

13(3-5): 187–193 In 2009, he was awarded the

ACM ACM or A.C.M. may refer to: Aviation * AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile * Air chief marshal * Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting * Air cycle machine * Arica Airport (Colombia) (IATA: ACM), in Arica, Amazonas, Colombia Computing * ...

SIGPLAN SIGPLAN is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on programming languages. Conferences * Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) * Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) * International Symposium o ...

Programming Language Achievement Award.

Books

* May 1971: ''Programming in POP-11'',

Edinburgh University Press Edinburgh University Press is a scholarly publisher of academic books and journals, based in Edinburgh, Scotland. History Edinburgh University Press was founded in the 1940s and became a wholly owned subsidiary of the University of Edinburgh ...

. * 1980: (with

Alan Bundy Alan Richard Bundy is a professor at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh,http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/bundy/ Professor Alan Bundy's website known for his contributions to automated reasoning, especially to proof planning ...

) ''Artificial Intelligence: An Introductory Course'', Edinburgh University Press. * 1988: (with D. E. Rydeheard) ''Computational Category Theory'',

Prentice-Hall Prentice Hall was an American major educational publisher owned by Savvas Learning Company. Prentice Hall publishes print and digital content for the 6–12 and higher-education market, and distributes its technical titles through the Safari B ...

, .

References

External links

University of Edinburgh home page

Rod Burstall Home Page
* 1934 births Living people Scientists from Liverpool British computer scientists Formal methods people History of computing in the United Kingdom Academics of the University of Edinburgh Alumni of the University of Cambridge Alumni of the University of Birmingham {{UK-compu-bio-stub