Rodney Martineau "Rod" Burstall FRSE (born 1934) is a British computer scientist 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 i ...

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 The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

, then an M.Sc. in

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 deci ...

Birmingham University , mottoeng = Through efforts to heights , established = 1825 – Birmingham School of Medicine and Surgery1836 – Birmingham Royal School of Medicine and Surgery1843 – Queen's College1875 – Mason Science College1898 – Mason Univers ...

. 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 ...

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-2, POP programming languages, and for his work on Fr ...

on POP, an innovative programming language developed at

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

around 1970, and later work with John Darlington 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 Donald T. Sannella FRSE is professor of computer science in the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Sannella graduated from Yale University, University of California, ...

on Hope, a precursor to Standard ML, 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. Burstall retired in 2000, becoming Professor Emeritus. In 2002 David Rydeheard and

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 h ...

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 an ...

.D. Rydeheard &

(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

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 on ...

Programming Language Achievement Award.

Books

* May 1971: ''Programming in POP-11'', Edinburgh University Press. * 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, .

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