Mathematician:Robert W Floyd

Mathematician

American computer scientist, who was active in discrete mathematics.

Noted for his work on parsing.

Introduced the concept of error diffusion for rendering images.

Pioneered the field of program verification using logical assertions. This contributed to what later became Hoare logic.

Nationality

American

History

• Born: June 8, 1936 in New York City
• Died: September 25, 2001 in Stanford

Theorems and Definitions

• Floyd-Warshall Algorithm (independently of Stephen Warshall), which efficiently finds all shortest paths in a graph
• Floyd-Steinberg Dithering

Publications

• 1967: Assigning meanings to programs (Proc. Symp. Appl. Math. Vol. 19: pp. 19 – 32)
• 1979: The Paradigms of Programming
• 1994: The Language of Machines: an Introduction to Computability and Formal Languages (with Richard Beigel)

• Major reviewer for Donald E. Knuth's seminal book The Art of Computer Programming, and is the person most cited in that work.

Also known as

Robert W Floyd legally changed his middle name to W from Willoughby, but preferred to continue to abbreviate it as W., including the period.