Richard Simpson Bird | |
|---|---|
 Professor Richard S. Bird | |
| Born | 13 February 1943 London, England |
| Died | 4 April 2022 (aged 79) |
| Known for | Algorithm design Functional programming Bird–Meertens formalism |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | University of Reading University of Oxford |
| Website | www |
Richard Simpson Bird (4 February 1943 – 4 April 2022)[1] was an English computer scientist.
He was a Supernumerary Fellow of Computation at Lincoln College, University of Oxford, in Oxford England,[2] and former director of the Oxford University Computing Laboratory (now the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford).[3] Formerly, Bird was at the University of Reading.
Bird's research interests lay in algorithm design and functional programming, and he was known as a regular contributor to the Journal of Functional Programming, and as author of several books promoting use of the programming language Haskell, including Introduction to Functional Programming using Haskell,[4] Thinking Functionally with Haskell,[5] Algorithm Design with Haskell co-authored with Jeremy Gibbons,[6] and other books on related topics.[7][8] His name is associated with the Bird–Meertens formalism, a calculus for deriving programs from specifications in a functional programming style.
He was a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi,[9] which specified, supports, and maintains the programming languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.[10]
