Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
runat="server" id="h2">Professor Robin Milner
Oration given on 14 July 2000
Chancellor, the Senate of the University has resolved that
the degree of Doctor of the University be conferred upon Professor Robin
Milner.
It is not too long ago that an electronic calculating machine, one that did
little more than compute square roots and the four rules of number, had to be
moved about the University on a trolley, so large and cumbersome was it.
Today, every school pupil has a pocket calculator, at the cost of only a pound
or two each. Similarly, today’s laptop computers can perform the same
functions, and more, as machines that once occupied the space of a large room.
Only a few days ago a supercomputer was announced that is capable of 12 trillion
calculations per second. Apparently, an individual with a calculator would
take ten million years to do the calculations this new machine is capable of
doing in just one second.
These spectacular achievements are to a large degree the consequences of
innovations in engineering and miniaturisation, as well, of course, as the
efforts of brilliant inventors and innovators. But that is only part of
the story. In order to be able to utilise the awesome capacity of these
machines (and, indeed, to act as a stimulus to their invention), we have to be
capable of “speaking “ to them, of communicating with them; in other words,
there has to exist a “language” that enables the machine to comprehend us, and
us to comprehend whatever the machine has to tell us. It is in this last
realm that Professor Robin Milner’s tremendous achievements have been made: if
ever the phrase “working at the very boundaries of knowledge” applied, it is in
the case of Professor Milner.
Professor Milner was born in 1934 and educated at Eton College and King’s
College, Cambridge, whence he graduated with a BA in Mathematics in 1957.
He was briefly a Mathematics teacher at Marylebone Grammar School, and then,
also briefly, he worked for the electronics firm Ferranti. It was in
1959 that his career as a university teacher and researcher began.
Professionally, it was a journey that took him ever upwards; geographically he
went from a lectureship at City University, London, via University College,
Swansea, Stanford University California, Edinburgh University, where for a
decade he was Professor of Computation Theory, until in 1995 he came to rest
(career-wise, that is, not intellectually!) as Fellow of his old college, King’s
Cambridge and Professor of Computer Science.
Robin Milner’s life has paralleled a time of unparalleled discovery in
computing and electronics. If Charles Babbage, who died in 1871,
mathematician and pioneer of machine computing, never saw his machine reach
practical fruition, another great innovator, Alan Turing, who developed the
concept of a theoretical computing machine in 1937, had to wait until the
imperative of war brought its realisation at Bletchley Park in connection with
the breaking of the German Enigma codes. Since 1945, the pace has been
breathtaking and shows no sign of abating. In Robin Milner’s case, it has
not been merely a question of keeping pace; he himself has more often than not
been setting it.
Today, they are so much a part of our lives that we often forget that
computers are not just machines that sit on our desks and enable us to
communicate with distant friends or give access to the Internet. Computers are
ubiquitous. They are to be found in, for example, our washing machines, in
aircraft, on ships, in industry and in space.
The list is endless. But what if there is more than one computer in a
single item, and what if each computer is performing a different function?
What if, for instance, one on-board computer tells a ship’s rudder what to do,
while another regulates speed or fuel consumption? How can those diverse
computers be made to “talk” to each other, and how do we “talk” to them?
There is no certainty - indeed it is improbable - that these “multiple”
computers will be in step with each other; yet it is imperative that they are
all capable of functioning concurrently.
Robin Milner’s work in the field of concurrent systems, though absolutely
basic to most current work in the field, is but one of his principal
intellectual contributions to knowledge, so much so that today his theories and
discoveries are an integral and indispensable element in computer science
world-wide. In 1989, he published his Communication and Concurrency, and,
two years later, in 1991, he received the A.M. Turing Award, the highest
honour of the Association of Computing Machinery and generally recognised as the
premier award in computer science. The citation reads, inter alia, “Robin
Milner has the distinction of establishing an international reputation for three
distinct and complete achievements, each of which has had and will continue to
have a marked, important and widespread effect on both the theory and practice
of Computer Science”.
In addition to concurrency theory, Professor Milner is distinguished for his
pioneering work on what is known as LCF, Logic for Computable Functions, “the
first theoretically based yet practical tool for machine-assisted proof
construction”.
The third major field in which Professor Milner’s achievements lie is in type
inference, a formal approach to confirming that programmes are computing with at
least the right sort of data; type inference lets them avoid talking nonsense.
In 1988, Professor Milner was elected an FRS, Fellow of the Royal Society,
perhaps the primus inter pares of the many honours and distinctions that he has
been awarded, another of which was receipt of an honorary degree from the
University of Bologna. Towards the conclusion of his speech to the
congregation in that ancient Italian city, he ventured a prediction. It
was this: “I believe”, he said, “that computer science or informatics, which
began as just the engineering of scientific and business calculations, has
broadened into a descriptive science with enormous breadth of application, not
just to computation but to dynamic systems in general”.
That that predication is already largely fulfilled is due in substantial part
to Professor Milner.
Chancellor, I present to you Arthur John Robin Gorell Milner.