John Alan Robinson
| John Alan Robinson | |
|---|---|
John Alan Robinson in 2012
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| Born |
9 March 1930 Halifax, West Yorkshire, UK |
| Died | 5 August 2016 (aged 86) Portland, Maine, U.S. ruptured aneurysm following surgery for pancreatic cancer |
| Institutions | Syracuse University |
| Alma mater |
Cambridge University University of Oregon Princeton University |
| Thesis | Causation, probability and testimony (1957) |
| Doctoral advisor | Carl Hempel |
| Known for | resolution principle, unification |
| Notable awards | AMS Milestone Award 1985, Humboldt Senior Scientist Award 1995, Herbrand Award 1996 |
John Alan Robinson (9 March 1930 – 5 August 2016) was a philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist. He was a professor emeritus at Syracuse University.
Alan Robinson's major contribution is to the foundations of automated theorem proving. His unification algorithm eliminated one source of combinatorial explosion in resolution provers; it also prepared the ground for the logic programming paradigm, in particular for the Prolog language. Robinson received the 1996 Herbrand Award for Distinguished Contributions to Automated Reasoning.
Robinson was born in Halifax, Yorkshire, England in 1930 and left for the United States in 1952 with a classics degree from Cambridge University. He studied philosophy at the University of Oregon before moving to Princeton University where he received his PhD in philosophy in 1956. He then worked at Du Pont as an operations research analyst, where he learned programming and taught himself mathematics. He moved to Rice University in 1961, spending his summers as a visiting researcher at the Argonne 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.
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