Corrado Böhm

In his PhD dissertation (in Mathematics, at ETH Zurich, 1951; published in 1954), Böhm describes for the first time a full meta-circular compiler, that is a translation mechanism of a programming language, written in that same language. His most influential contribution is the so-called structured program theorem, published in 1966 together with Giuseppe Jacopini. Together with Alessandro Berarducci, he demonstrated an isomorphism between the strictly-positive algebraic data types and the polymorphic lambda-terms, otherwise known as Böhm–Berarducci encoding.[1]

In the lambda calculus, he established an important separation theorem between normal forms, known as Böhm's theorem, which states that for every two closed λ-terms T₁ and T₂ which have different βη-normal forms, there exists a term Δ where Δ T₁ and Δ T₂ evaluate to different free variables (i.e., they may be taken apart internally). This means that, for normalizing terms, Morris' contextual equivalence, which is a semantic property, may be decided through equality of normal forms, a syntactic property, as it coincides with βη-equality.

A special issue of Theoretical Computer Science was dedicated to him in 1993, on his 70th birthday. He is the recipient of the 2001 EATCS Award for a distinguished career in theoretical computer science.

• C. Böhm, "Calculatrices digitales. Du déchiffrage des formules mathématiques par la machine même dans la conception du programme", Annali di Mat. pura e applicata, serie IV, tomo XXXVII, 1–51, 1954. PDF at ETH Zürich English translation 2016 by Peter Sestoft
• C. Böhm, "On a family of Turing machines and the related programming language", ICC Bull., 3, 185–194, July 1964.

  Introduced P′′, the first imperative language without GOTO to be proved Turing-complete.

• C. Böhm, G. Jacopini, "Flow diagrams, Turing Machines and Languages with only Two Formation Rules", Comm. of the ACM, 9(5): 366–371,1966.
• C. Böhm, "Alcune proprietà delle forme β-η-normali nel λ-K-calcolo", Pubbl. INAC, n. 696, Roma, 1968.
• C. Böhm, A. Berarducci, "Automatic Synthesis of typed Lambda-programs on Term Algebras", Theoretical Computer Science, 39: 135–154, 1985.
• C. Böhm, "Functional Programming and Combinatory algebras", MFCS, Carlsbad, Czechoslovakia, eds M.P. Chytil, L. Janiga and V. Koubek, LNCS 324, 14–26, 1988.

• P′′, a minimal computer programming language
• Structured program theorem
• List of pioneers in computer science
• Böhm tree
• Böhm's theorem

• Vitae (University of Rome)

• Corrado Böhm at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• "A Collection of Contributions in Honour of Corrado Böhm on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday", Theoretical Computer Science, Volume 121, Numbers 1&2, 1993.
• Corrado Böhm's personal page.