Rod Burstall
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Rodney Martineau Burstall (11 November 1934 – 13 February 2025) was a British computer scientist who was one of four founders of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh.[1]
Biography
Burstall studied physics at the University of Cambridge, then an M.Sc. in operational research at the University of Birmingham. He worked for three years before returning to Birmingham University[2] to earn a Ph.D. 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.[3]
Burstall was an early and influential proponent of functional programming, pattern matching, and list comprehension, and is known for his work with Robin Popplestone on COWSEL (renamed POP-1) and POP-2, innovative programming languages developed at the University of Edinburgh around 1970, and later work with John Darlington on NPL and program transformation and with David MacQueen and Don Sannella on Hope, a precursor to Standard ML, Miranda, and Haskell.[4] In 1995, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.[5] Burstall retired in 2000, becoming Professor Emeritus.Script error: No such module "Unsubst".
In 2002, David Rydeheard and Don Sannella assembled a festschrift for Burstall that was published in Formal Aspects of Computing.[4]
In 2009, he was awarded the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGPLAN Programming Language Achievement Award.[6][7]
Burstall died on 13 February 2025, at the age of 90.[8]
Books
- May 1971: Programming in POP-11, Edinburgh University Press.
- 1980: (with Alan Bundy) Artificial Intelligence: An Introductory Course, Edinburgh University Press.
- 1988: (with D. E. Rydeheard) Computational Category Theory, Prentice-Hall, Template:ISBN.
References
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- ↑ a b D. Rydeheard & Don Sannella (July 2002) "A Collection of Papers and Memoirs Celebrating the Contribution of Rod Burstall to Advances in Computer Science", Formal Aspects of Computing 13(3-5): 187–193 Script error: No such module "CS1 identifiers".
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External links
- University of Edinburgh home page (Archived)
- Rod Burstall Home Page (Archived)
- Template:First word Rod M. Burstall at DBLP Bibliography ServerTemplate:EditAtWikidata
Template:POP programming Template:Lisp programming language Template:Authority control
- Pages with script errors
- Pages with reference errors
- 1934 births
- 2025 deaths
- Scientists from Liverpool
- English computer scientists
- Programming language researchers
- Programming language designers
- English computer programmers
- 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