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Memorial Tributes Volume 20 (2016) / Chapter Skim
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ROBIN MILNER
Pages 174-179

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From page 175...
... He then joined a major British computer manufacturer, Ferranti Ltd., to work as a programmer. In 1963 he was appointed a lecturer in mathematics and computing at the City University, London, where he acquired his lifelong interest in automata theory, programming languages, artificial intelligence, and the relationship of logic with computation.
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From page 176...
... With Rod Burstall, Matthew Hennessy, and Gordon Plotkin, he founded and then served as the first director of the worldfamous Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science. In 1990–1994 he resumed full-time research, supported by a senior fellowship from the national funding agency SERC.
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From page 177...
... This is an elegant formal expression of a philosophical principle common to both scientific theories and engineering specifications. His next accomplishment was the pi-calculus, which models dynamic reconfiguration of communication channels between concurrent processes, and defines a notion of structural equivalence in terms of algebraic axioms and proof rules.
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From page 178...
... From 2003 he was joint leader with Tony Hoare of a series of discussions in the UK, working toward agreement on longterm goals for computer science research, including the possibility of Grand Challenge projects. It was inspired by the completion in that year of the Human Genome Project, and it later secured sponsorship by the UKCRC.
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From page 179...
... Robin's publications included Edinburgh LCF: A Mechanised Logic of Computation (with Mike Gordon and Chris Wadsworth; Springer, 1979) , Commentary on Standard ML (with Mads Tofte; MIT Press, 1991)
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