- John Alan Robinson
John Alan Robinson is a
philosopher (by training),mathematician andcomputer scientist . He is University Professor Emeritus atSyracuse University ,United States .Alan Robinson's major contribution is to the foundations of
automated theorem proving andlogic programming , using theresolution principle andunification (1965). This enabled the efficient implementation of theProlog logic programming language andtheorem prover s.Robinson received the 1996Herbrand Award for Distinguished Contributions to Automated Reasoning (named after the mathematicianJacques Herbrand ).Life
Robinson was born in
Yorkshire ,England in 1930 and left for the United States in 1952 with aclassics degree fromCambridge University . He studiedphilosophy at theUniversity of Oregon before moving toPrinceton University where he received his PhD in philosophy in 1956. He then worked atDu Pont as anoperations research analyst, where he learned programming and taught himselfmathematics . He moved toRice University in 1961, spending his summers as a visiting researcher at theArgonne National Laboratory 's Applied Mathematics Division. He moved to Syracuse University as Distinguished Professor of Logic and Computer Science in 1967 and became professor emeritus in 1993.It was at Argonne that Robinson became interested in automated theorem proving and developed unification and the resolution principle. Resolution and unification have since been incorporated in many automated theorem-proving systems and are the basis for the inference mechanisms used in logic programming and the programming language Prolog.
Robinson was the Founding Editor of "
The Journal of Logic Programming ", and has received numerous honours, including aGuggenheim Fellowship ,American Mathematical Society Milestone Award in Automatic Theorem Proving, Herbrand Award for Distinguished Contributions to Automatic Reasoning,AAAI Fellow, and several honorary doctorates.Selected publications
* John Alan Robinson, "A Machine-Oriented Logic Based on the Resolution Principle", "
Communications of the ACM ", 5:23–41, 1965.
* Michael A. Arbib and J. Alan Robinson (eds.), "Natural and Artificial Parallel Computation",The MIT Press , 1990.
* J. Alan Robinson and Andrei Voronkov (eds.), "Handbook of Automated Reasoning", The MIT Press, 2001.See also
* List of important publications in computer science
External links
*
* [http://www.cadeconference.org/herbrand-award/1996.html Herbrand Award 1996: J. Alan Robinson]
* [http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/author/default.asp?aid=1259 Books] listed byThe MIT Press
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