Turing award winner and programming language trailblazer,
Robin Milner, who recently passed away, has a cover story in the latest Communications of the ACM.
A man of modest background and quiet brilliance, Milner made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of verification, programming languages, and concurrency. He was born in 1934 near Plymouth, England, and won scholarships to Eton—where he developed an enduring love of math as well as a prodigious work ethic—and King’s College, Cambridge. It was during his time at Cambridge that Milner was introduced to programming, though the subject didn’t interest him initially. “I regarded programming as really rather inelegant,” he recalled in an interview in 2001 with Martin Berger, a professor at the University of Sussex. “So I resolved that I would never go near a computer in my life.”
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