Robert W. Floyd

Robert W. Floyd (June 8, 1936 - September 25, 2001) was a prominent American computer scientist.

Born in New York, Floyd finished high school at age 14. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1953 at age 17 and as a Physicist in 1958.

A computer operator in the 1960s, he published his first influential papers and was appointed associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Six years later he was appointed a professor at Stanford University.

His contributions included the design and analysis of efficient algorithms for finding the shortest path in a graph and for the sentence recognition problem, but probably his most important achievement was pioneering, with his 1967 paper < i>«Assigning Meanings to Programs», in the area of program verification using logical assertions, where the important notion of invariant appears, essential for proving properties of iterative programs.

Floyd received the ACM Turing Award in 1978 "for having a clear influence on methodologies for creating efficient and reliable software, and for having contributed to the founding of the sub-areas phrase recognition theory, language semantics, programming languages, automated program verification, automated program synthesis, and algorithm analysis.

Posts

• Robert W. Floyd (1967) Assigning Meanings to Programs. In J. T. Schwartz (ed.): Proceedings of Symposium on Applied Mathematical Aspects of Computer Science, American Mathematical Society, pp. 19-32.