Rod Burstall

Short description: British computer scientist

Rod Burstall

Born| November 1934 (1934-11) (age 88)

Liverpool, England

Alma mater| University of Cambridge
Birmingham University
Scientific career
Fields| Computer science
Institutions| University of Edinburgh
Doctoral advisor| N. A. Dudley
K. Brian Haley[1]
Doctoral students| Thorsten Altenkirch
John Darlington
Mike Gordon
Conor McBride
J Strother Moore
Alan Mycroft
Gordon Plotkin
Don Sannella
Website| http://www.freewebs.com/rodburstall/

Rodney Martineau "Rod" Burstall FRSE (born 1934) is a British computer scientist and one of four founders of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh.[2]

## Contents

* 1 Biography
* 2 Books
* 3 References
* 4 External links

## Biography

Burstall studied physics at the University of Cambridge, then an M.Sc. in operational research at Birmingham University. He worked for three years before returning to Birmingham University[3] to earn a Ph.D. in 1966 with thesis titled Heuristic and Decision Tree Methods on Computers: Some Operational Research Applications under the supervision of N. A. Dudley and K. B. Haley.[1]

Burstall was an early and influential proponent of functional programming, pattern matching, and list comprehension, and is known for his work with Robin Popplestone on POP, an innovative programming language developed at Edinburgh around 1970, and later work with John Darlington on NPL and program transformation and with David MacQueen and Don Sannella on Hope, a precursor to Standard ML, Miranda, and Haskell.[4]

In 1995, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.[5]

Burstall retired in 2000, becoming Professor Emeritus.

In 2002 David Rydeheard and Don Sannella assembled a festschrift for Rod Burstall that was published in Formal Aspects of Computing.[4]

In 2009, he was awarded the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Language Achievement Award.[6][7]

## Books

* May 1971: Programming in POP-11, Edinburgh University Press.
* 1980: (with Alan Bundy) Artificial Intelligence: An Introductory Course, Edinburgh University Press.
* 1988: (with D. E. Rydeheard) Computational Category Theory, Prentice-Hall, ISBN:978-0131627369.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Rod Burstall at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
2. ↑ Kerse, Eleanor (2002). "Ode to Rod Burstall". Formal Aspects of Computing (Springer) 13 (3–5): 194. doi:10.1007/s001650200007.
3. ↑ "Rod Burstall's home page". University of Edinburgh. http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rburstall/. Retrieved 31 Oct 2012.
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 D. Rydeheard & Don Sannella (July 2002) "A Collection of Papers and Memoirs Celebrating the Contribution of Rod Burstall to Advances in Computer Science", Formal Aspects of Computing 13(3-5): 187–193 doi:10.1007/s001650200006
5. ↑ "Professor Rodney Martineau Burstall FRSE - The Royal Society of Edinburgh" (in en-GB). The Royal Society of Edinburgh. https://www.rse.org.uk/fellow/rodney-burstall/.
6. ↑ "SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award — 2009: Rod Burstall". ACM SIGPLAN. http://sigplan.org/Awards/Achievement/Main. Retrieved 22 September 2012.
7. ↑ Wallace, Malcolm. "SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award: Rod Burstall". Vimeo. http://vimeo.com/6654363. Retrieved 22 September 2012. Introduced by Philip Wadler.

## External links

* University of Edinburgh home page
* Rod Burstall Home Page
* {{DBLP}} template missing ID and not present in Wikidata.

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