Floyd, Robert W

Robert W Floyd, (born June 8, 1936, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Sept. 25, 2001), American computer scientist and winner of the 1978 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, 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.”

In 1953 Floyd earned a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts from the University of Chicago, where he had enrolled as part of an experimental program for gifted children. On graduation, he was employed by the Armour Research Foundation of the Illinois Institute of Technology, first as a computer operator and then as a computer programmer. He found time to earn a second bachelor’s degree, in physics, from the University of Chicago in 1958. In 1962 Floyd moved to Wakefield, Mass., to work as a senior project scientist for Computer Associates, an early software firm that specialized in writing compilers.

Floyd joined the computer science faculty of the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1965. Computer science was a new academic discipline, and Floyd was instrumental in developing the school’s curriculum. In 1968 Floyd moved on to the computer science department at Stanford University, where he became a full professor in 1970. Shortly after his retirement from Stanford in 1994, Floyd was diagnosed with Pick disease, a rare form of premature dementia.

Floyd was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He served on the editorial board of the Communications of the ACM for many years and received the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award in 1992. With American computer scientist Richard Beigel, Floyd wrote the classic The Language of Machines: An Introduction to Computability and Formal Languages (1994).