| Richard Simpson Bird | |
| Birth Date: | 13 February 1943 |
| Birth Place: | London, England |
| Fields: | Computer science |
| Workplaces: | University of Reading University of Oxford |
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| Thesis1 Year: | and |
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| Known For: | Algorithm design Functional programming Bird–Meertens formalism |
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Richard Simpson Bird (4 February 1943 – 4 April 2022)[1] was an English computer scientist.
He was a Supernumerary Fellow of Computation at Lincoln College, University of Oxford, in Oxford England,[2] and former director of the Oxford University Computing Laboratory (now the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford).[3] Formerly, Bird was at the University of Reading.
Bird's research interests lay in algorithm design and functional programming, and he was known as a regular contributor to the Journal of Functional Programming, and as author of several books promoting use of the programming language Haskell, including Introduction to Functional Programming using Haskell,[4] Thinking Functionally with Haskell,[5] Algorithm Design with Haskell co-authored with Jeremy Gibbons,[6] and other books on related topics.[7] [8] His name is associated with the Bird–Meertens formalism, a calculus for deriving programs from specifications in a functional programming style.
He was a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi,[9] which specified, supports, and maintains the programming languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.[10]