Robert Floyd
| Robert W Floyd | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 8, 1936 New York City |
| Died | September 25, 2001 (aged 65) Stanford |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions |
Carnegie Mellon University Stanford University Illinois Institute of Technology |
| Alma mater | University of Chicago |
| Known for |
Floyd–Warshall algorithm Floyd–Steinberg dithering Floyd's cycle-finding algorithm |
| Notable awards |
Turing Award (1978) Computer Pioneer Award (1991) |
| Spouse | Christiane Floyd (née Reidl) |
Robert W (Bob) Floyd (June 8, 1936 – September 25, 2001) was an eminent computer scientist.
His contributions include the design of the Floyd–Warshall algorithm (independently of Stephen Warshall), 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 (though he distinguished dithering from diffusion). A significant achievement was pioneering the field of program verification using logical assertions with the 1967 paper Assigning Meanings to Programs. This was an important contribution to what later became Hoare logic.
Born in New York City, Floyd finished school at age 14. At the University of Chicago, he received a Bachelor's degree in liberal arts in 1953 (when still only 17) 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 (now IIT Research Institute) at Illinois Institute of Technology in the 1950s. Becoming a computer operator in the early 1960s, he began publishing many noteworthy papers, including compilers (particularly parsing). He was a pioneer of operator-precedence grammars, and is credited with initiating the field of programming language semantics in Floyd (1967). 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 Ph.D.
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