Robin Milner

Graduating from King's College, Cambridge in 1952, Milner first worked as a schoolteacher than as a programmer at Ferranti, before entering academia at City University, London, then Swansea University, Stanford University, and from 1973 at Edinburgh University, before finally returning to Cambridge as the head of the Computer Laboratory in 1995.

Milner is generally regarded to have made three major contributions to computer science. He developed one of the first tools for automated theorem proving, LCF. Along the way, the language he developed for the purpose ML, a functional programming language which was the first language with polymorphic type inference and type-safe exception handling. In a very different area, Milner also developed a thoretical framework for analysing concurrent systems, the calculus of communicating systems (CCS), and its successor, the pi-calculus.

He was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1988 and received the ACM Turing Award in 1991.

External Links and References

• review of "Proof, Language and Interaction", a book on computer science dedicated to Milner and covering many areas of his work.
• Milner's Cambridge homepage
• An interview with Robin Milner; Martin Berger; 3 September 2003.