Biographies: Robert W Floyd, in Memoriam

Abstract

Robert Floyd was among the most brilliant computer scientists of his generation, the early careers of which took shape in parallel with the discipline itself. In this elegant tribute and memoir, Floyd's longtime colleague Donald E. Knuth draws upon many of his original documents and letters to explore Floyd's remarkably diverse contributions to computer science. This article is an edited version of a personal appreciation of Floyd first published in the newsletter SIGACT News (vol. 34, no. 4, Dec. 2003). That, in turn, was based on a lecture Knuth delivered in his informal "Computer Musings" lecture series at Stanford. A video recording of that lecture can be seen on the Web site of Stanford's Center for Professional Development ( http://www. scpd.stanford.edu ). As Knuth notes, the citation given with Floyd's Turing Award credited him with (among other things) helping to found study of "the theory of parsing, the semantics of programming languages, automatic program verification, automatic program synthesis, and analysis of algorithms." In an earlier version of this article, Knuth suggested that he would "not attempt to give a traditional biography..." and that this task would "be undertaken before long by professional historians who are much more qualified than I."