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J. Alan Robinson
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J. Alan Robinson is a philosopher (by training), mathematician and computer scientist. He is University Professor Emeritus at Syracuse University, USA.
Alan Robinson's major contribution is to the foundations of automated theorem proving and logic programming, using the resolution principle and unification (1965). This enabled the efficient implementation of the Prolog logic programming language and theorem provers.
Robinson received the 1996 Herbrand Award for Distinguished Contributions to Automated Reasoning (named after the mathematician Jacques Herbrand).
Life
John Alan Robinson was born in
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.
It was at Argonne that Robinson became interested in automated theorem proving and developed unification and the resolution principle. Resolution and unification have since been incorporated in many automated theorem-proving systems and are the basis for the inference mechanisms used in logic programming and the programming language Prolog.
Robinson was the Founding Editor of
The Journal of Logic Programming, and has received numerous honours, including a
Guggenheim Fellowship,
American Mathematical Society Milestone Award in Automatic Theorem Proving, Herbrand Award for Distinguished Contributions to Automatic Reasoning,
AAAI Fellow, and several honorary doctorates.
Selected publications
- John Alan Robinson, "A Machine-Oriented Logic Based on the Resolution Principle", Communications of the ACM, 5:23–41, 1965.
- Michael A. Arbib and J. Alan Robinson (eds.), Natural and Artificial Parallel Computation, The MIT Press, 1990.
- J. Alan Robinson and Andrei Voronkov (eds.), Handbook of Automated Reasoning, The MIT Press, 2001.
See also
