Peter J. Landin
| Peter Landin | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 5 June 1930 |
| Died | 3 June 2009 (aged 78) |
| Nationality | British |
| Known for | ISWIM, J operator, SECD machine, off-side rule |
Peter John Landin (5 June 1930, Sheffield – 3 June 2009) was a British computer scientist. He was one of the first to realize that the lambda calculus could be used to model a programming language, an insight that is essential to development of both functional programming and denotational semantics.
Landin was born in Sheffield, where he attended King Edward VII School; he graduated from Clare College, Cambridge University. From 1960 to 1964, he was the assistant to Christopher Strachey when the latter was an independent computer consultant in London. Most of his work was published during this period and the brief time he worked for Univac and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States before taking a position at Queen Mary, University of London. During the 1970s and 1980s, his efforts went into building the Computer Science department in Queen Mary College, developing courses and teaching students. On his retirement, he was appointed Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Computation at Queen Mary, University of London, where in 2012 the Computer Science building was renamed the Peter Landin Building in his honour.
At a workshop at the Science Museum, London, in 2001, on the history of programming semantics he spoke of how his scholarly career in computer science began in the late 1950s and of how he was much influenced by a study of McCarthy's LISP when the most commonly used language was Fortran.
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