Rod Burstall Explained

Rod Burstall
Birth Place:	Liverpool, England
Field:	Computer science
Workplaces:	University of Edinburgh
Alma Mater:	University of Cambridge University of Birmingham
Doctoral Advisor:	N. A. Dudley K. Brian Haley
Doctoral Students:	Thorsten Altenkirch John Darlington Mike Gordon Conor McBride J Strother Moore Alan Mycroft Gordon Plotkin Don Sannella
Known For:	COWSEL (renamed POP-1), POP-2, NPL, Hope
Awards:	ACM SIGPLAN 2009 Programming Language Achievement Award
Website:	https://web.archive.org/web/20210225112350/http://www.freewebs.com/rodburstall/

Rodney Martineau "Rod" Burstall (born 1934) Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) is a British computer scientist and one of four founders of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh.^[1]

Biography

Burstall studied physics at the University of Cambridge, then an M.Sc. in operational research at the University of Birmingham. He worked for three years before returning to Birmingham University^[2] 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.

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 COWSEL (renamed POP-1) and POP-2, innovative programming languages developed at the University of 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.

In 1995, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.^[3]

Burstall retired in 2000, becoming Professor Emeritus.

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

In 2009, he was awarded the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGPLAN Programming Language Achievement Award.^{[5] [6]}

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, .

External links

• University of Edinburgh home page (Archived)
• Rod Burstall Home Page (Archived)

Notes and References

1. Kerse . Eleanor . 2002 . Ode to Rod Burstall . Formal Aspects of Computing . 13 . 3–5 . 194 . 10.1007/s001650200007 . . 917027.
2. Web site: Rod Burstall's home page . University of Edinburgh . 31 Oct 2012.
3. News: Professor Rodney Martineau Burstall FRSE – The Royal Society of Edinburgh . The Royal Society of Edinburgh . 2018-03-12 . en-GB.
4. 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
5. Web site: SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award – 2009: Rod Burstall . . 22 September 2012.
6. Web site: SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award: Rod Burstall . Malcolm . Wallace . . 22 September 2012 . . Introduced by Philip Wadler..