Arthur John Robin Gorell Milner FRS (13 January 1934 – 20 March 2010) was a British computer scientist. He received the 1991 ACM Turing Award.

Life, education and career

Milner was born in Yealmpton, near Plymouth, England, into a military family. In 1947, he received a King's Scholarship to attend Eton College. In 1952, he earned the Tomline Prize, which is the highest award for mathematics at Eton. Later, he served in the Royal Engineers, reaching the rank of Second Lieutenant. He then studied at King's College, Cambridge, and graduated in 1957. After graduation, Milner worked as a schoolteacher and later as a programmer at Ferranti. He later joined academia, teaching at City University, London, Swansea University, Stanford University, and from 1973 at the University of Edinburgh. At Edinburgh, he helped start the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science (LFCS). In 1995, he became the head of the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge and remained there until he stepped down, though he continued working at the laboratory. From 2009, Milner held the position of Scottish Informatics & Computer Science Alliance Advanced Research Fellow and also taught part-time as a computer science professor at the University of Edinburgh.

Milner died of a heart attack on 20 March 2010 in Cambridge. His wife, Lucy, passed away shortly before his death.

Contributions

Milner is known for making three major contributions to computer science. He created Logic for Computable Functions (LCF), one of the first tools used to prove mathematical theorems automatically. The programming language he developed for LCF, called ML, was the first to include features such as a way to automatically determine data types, safe ways to handle errors, and a system that automatically figures out data types using algorithm W. Milner also created two tools to study systems that happen at the same time: the calculus of communicating systems (CCS) and its later version, the π-calculus.

At the time of his death, he was working on bigraphs, a method for describing computing systems that includes CCS and the π-calculus. He is also credited with helping to find the Hindley–Milner type system.

Honours and awards

In 1988, he was named a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society. In 1991, Milner received the ACM Turing Award. In 1994, he was inducted as a Fellow of the ACM. In 2004, the Royal Society of Edinburgh gave Milner a Royal Medal for helping people around the world. In 2008, he was elected a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Engineering for important work in computer science, such as creating LCF, ML, CCS, and the π-calculus. The Royal Society Milner Award and the ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award are both named in his honor.

Selected publications

• A Calculus of Communicating Systems by Robin Milner. Published by Springer-Verlag in 1980 (LNCS 92). ISBN 3-540-10235-3
• Communication and Concurrency by Robin Milner. Published by Prentice Hall International Series in Computer Science in 1989. ISBN 0-13-115007-3
• The Definition of Standard ML by Robin Milner, Mads Tofte, and Robert Harper. Published by MIT Press in 1990
• Commentary on Standard ML by Robin Milner and Mads Tofte. Published by MIT Press in 1991. ISBN 0-262-63137-7
• The Definition of Standard ML (Revised) by Robin Milner, Mads Tofte, Robert Harper, and David MacQueen. Published by MIT Press in 1997. ISBN 0-262-63181-4
• Communicating and Mobile Systems: the π-Calculus by Robin Milner. Published by Cambridge University Press in 1999. ISBN 0-521-65869-1
• The Space and Motion of Communicating Agents by Robin Milner. Published by Cambridge University Press in 2009. ISBN 978-0-521-73833-0

For more information, see Publications by Robin Milner in DBLP.