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.”

I am very sorry to inform you that Peter Landin died yesterday of natural causes.

For those members who are several generations away from Peter’s early contributions, he was one of the major figures in the UK at the time that Computer Science was beginning to establish itself as a discipline. Some of his papers from 40 years ago are essential reading for any serious student of programming languages as still the simplest and clearest exposition of ideas that remain fundamental. The ideas in his papers were truly original and beautiful, but Peter never had a simplistic approach to scientific progress, and would scoff at the idea of individual personal contribution. Some of his own greatest contribution to the field was as part of a golden nexus of work on programming languages in the UK in the late 60’s and early 70’s, containing Dana Scott and Christopher Strachey and others as well as Peter. The ideas they developed through their discussions truly lifted the study of programming languages to another level, and are now part of the bedrock of the subject.

Unrealistic and unreasonable aspirations almost always lead to conflict.

I went to a UofO summer school in 2003 and really enjoyed it. This sort of thing is great for junior graduate students; they give you a broad overview of topics from the world’s best researchers. It’s great if you’re not sure what you want to work on, or if you want to build up your theoretical tool kit. Later in your studies, you won’t have time for this kind of breadth. Also, don’t expect to digest all of it. I know I didn’t. But hopefully you’ll get something in your head. Years later when you’re deep in the throes of research you’ll have an “ah-ha” moment, deja vu sets in, and you realize that’s what they were talking about. It’s a really good feeling to realize I get it, now. But don’t worry, this brief moment of solace is quickly replaced by the more worrisome thought, why didn’t I figure this out sooner? When this sets in, I recommend keeping in mind Piet Hein’s T.T.T.:

Put up in a place
where it’s easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T.T.T.
When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb,
it’s well to remember that
Things Take Time.

(With thanks to Olivier Danvy for sharing this Grook, long before I knew what it meant.)

,

a universal Turing machine with 2 states and 3 symbols (the symbols are represented as colors and the states as arrows in the graphic). It is the world’s smallest universal TM. The machine was discovered (invented?) by Stephen Wolfram and proved universal last year by Alex Smith, a 20-year-old undergraduate hacker from Birmingham, UK, earning him $25,000 in prize money and a small brick, laid in the foundations of computation.