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Robert Floyd






Robert W Floyd ( June 8 , 1936September 25 , 2001 ) was an eminent Computer Scientist .

Born in New York , 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 .

Becoming a computer operator in the early 1960s , he began publishing many noteworthy papers and 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.

His contributions include the design of Floyd's Algorithm , which efficiently finds all shortest paths in a Graph , and 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 Assertion s with the 1967 paper ''Assigning Meanings to Programs''. This was an important contribution to what later became Hoare Logic .

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 received the , the Semantics Of Programming Languages , automatic Program Verification , automatic Program Synthesis , and Analysis Of Algorithms ".

Floyd married and divorced twice, and had four children. His hobbies included Backgammon and Hiking .


EXTERNAL LINKS AND SOURCES

  • http://sigact.acm.org/floyd

  • http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/news/november7/floydobit-117.html