Robert W. Floyd
Robert W "Bob" Floyd was a computer scientist.
His contributions include the design of the Floyd–Warshall algorithm, which efficiently finds all shortest paths in a graph, Floyd's cycle-finding algorithm for detecting cycles in a sequence, and his work on parsing. In one isolated paper he introduced the important concept of error diffusion for rendering images, also called Floyd–Steinberg dithering. He pioneered in the field of program verification using logical assertions with the 1967 paper Assigning Meanings to Programs. This was a contribution to what later became Hoare logic.
Floyd received the Turing Award in 1978.Life
Born in New York City, Floyd finished high school at age 14. At the University of Chicago, he received a Bachelor of Arts in liberal arts in 1953 and a second bachelor's degree in physics in 1958. Floyd was a college roommate of Carl Sagan.
Floyd became a staff member of the Armour Research Foundation at Illinois Institute of Technology in the 1950s. Becoming a computer operator in the early 1960s, he began publishing many papers, including on compilers. He was a pioneer of operator-precedence grammars, and is credited with initiating the field of programming language semantics in. He was appointed an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University by the time he was 27 and became a full professor at Stanford University six years later. He obtained this position without a Doctor of Philosophy degree.
He was a member of the International Federation for Information Processing IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi, which supports and maintains the programming languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.
He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974.
He received the Turing Award in 1978 "for having a clear influence on methodologies for the creation of efficient and reliable software, and for helping to found the following important subfields of computer science: the theory of parsing, the semantics of programming languages, automatic program verification, automatic program synthesis, and analysis of algorithms".
Floyd worked closely with Donald Knuth, in particular as the major reviewer for Knuth's seminal book The Art of Computer Programming, and is the person most cited in that work. He was co-author, with Richard Beigel, of the textbook The Language of Machines: an Introduction to Computability and Formal Languages. Floyd supervised seven Ph.D. graduates.
Floyd married and divorced twice, first with Jana M. Mason and then computer scientist Christiane Floyd, and he had four children. In his last years he suffered from Pick's disease, a neurodegenerative disease, and thus retired early in 1994.
His hobbies included hiking, and he was an avid backgammon player:Selected publications
