Robin Milner

Robin Milner (born Jan. 13, 1934, Yealmpton, Devon, Eng.—died March 20, 2010, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire) was an English computer scientist and winner of the 1991 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for his work with automatic theorem provers, the ML computer programming language, and a general theory of concurrency.

Milner attended Eton College and won a scholarship to attend the University of Cambridge in 1952, but he had to postpone his course work while he served at the Suez Canal with the Royal Engineers of the British army for the next two years. Milner entered Cambridge in 1954 and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1957. He was first exposed to computing in the summer of 1956 with a short course in programming in which he used the school’s EDSAC computer. After that, Milner moved to London, where he held various jobs, including a post teaching mathematics at Marylebone Grammar School (1959–60), before he became a computer programmer and developed compilers at Ferranti Ltd. (Ferranti produced the first commercial computer, the Ferranti Mark I, in 1951.)

In 1963 Milner left Ferranti for an academic position at City University London, where he taught mathematics to engineering students and began research in artificial intelligence (AI) and its application to databases. In 1968 Milner accepted a research position at the University of Wales, Swansea, where he worked on program verification, automatic theorem proving, and semantics. In 1971 Milner went to the United States to work with John McCarthy in the AI laboratory at Stanford University. Milner returned to Britain in 1973 to accept a position at the University of Edinburgh, where he helped design ML (“metalanguage”), a computer programming language developed for implementing an automatic theorem solver. In 1995 Milner returned to Cambridge as head of the school’s computer laboratory. He retired in 2001.

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Among other works, Milner was the author of A Calculus for Communicating Systems (1980), Communication and Concurrency (1989), Communicating and Mobile Systems: The Pi-Calculus (1999), and The Space and Motion of Communicating Agents (2009). He served as editor for Theoretical Computer Science, Research Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, Formal Aspects of Computing, and Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, and he was on the editorial board of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh: Section A, Mathematics.

Milner was elected to the Royal Society (1988), the British Computer Society (1988), the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1993), the Association of Computing Machinery (1994), the French Academy of Sciences (2005), and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (2008). In addition to the Turing Award, Milner received a British Computer Society Technical Award (1987), a Royal Society of Edinburgh Royal Gold Medal (2004), and a European Association for Theoretical Computer Science Distinguished Achievements Award (2005).