John Alan Robinson

John Alan Robinson (9 March 1930 – 5 August 2016) was a philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist. He was a professor emeritus at Syracuse University.

John Alan Robinson
Robinson in 2012
Born(1930-03-09)9 March 1930
Halifax, West Yorkshire, UK
Died5 August 2016(2016-08-05) (aged 86)
Portland, Maine, US
Alma materCambridge University
University of Oregon
Princeton University
Known forresolution principle, unification
AwardsAMS Milestone Award 1985, Humboldt Senior Scientist Award 1995, Herbrand Award 1996
Scientific career
InstitutionsSyracuse University
ThesisCausation, probability and testimony (1957)
Doctoral advisorCarl Hempel[1]

Alan Robinson's major contribution is to the foundations of automated theorem proving. His unification algorithm eliminated one source of combinatorial explosion in resolution provers; it also prepared the ground for the logic programming paradigm, in particular for the Prolog language. Robinson received the 1996 Herbrand Award for Distinguished Contributions to Automated Reasoning.

Life

Robinson was born in Halifax, Yorkshire, England in 1930[2] 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 DuPont as an operations research analyst, where he learned computer 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[3] and became professor emeritus in 1993.[4]

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.[5]

Robinson was the Founding Editor of the Journal of Logic Programming, and has received numerous honours. These include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967, the American Mathematical Society Milestone Award in Automatic Theorem Proving 1985,[6] an AAAI Fellowship 1990,[7] the Herbrand Award for Distinguished Contributions to Automatic Reasoning 1996,[8][9] and the Association for Logic Programming honorary title Founder of Logic Programming in 1997.[10] He has received honorary Doctorates from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven 1988,[11] Uppsala University 1994,[12] and Universidad Politecnica de Madrid 2003.[13][14] Robinson died in Portland, Maine on 5 August 2016 from a ruptured aneurysm following surgery for pancreatic cancer.[3]

In 1994, he received the Humboldt Senior Scientist Award at the request of Wolfgang Bibel, which included a six-month stay at the Department of Computer Science of the Technische Universität Darmstadt.[15][16]

Selected publications
  • Robinson, J. Alan; Voronkov, Andrei, eds. (2001). Handbook of Automated Reasoning. MIT Press. ISBN 0-444-50813-9.
  • Gabbay, Dov M.; Hogger, Christopher John; Robinson, J.A., eds. (1993-1998). Handbook of Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming. Vols. 1-5, Oxford University Press.
  • Arbib, Michael A.; Robinson, J. Alan, eds. (1990). Natural and Artificial Parallel Computation. MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-01120-4.
  • Robinson, J. A. (1979). Logic: Form and Function. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 0-85224-305-7.
  • Robinson, John Alan (January 1965). "A Machine-Oriented Logic Based on the Resolution Principle". J. ACM. 12 (1): 23–41. doi:10.1145/321250.321253. S2CID 14389185.
  • Robinson, John Alan (1957). Causation, Probability and Testimony (PhD thesis). Princeton University. OCLC 83304635.

See also

Notes
  1. "philosophyfamilytree record". Archived from the original on 28 October 2014. Retrieved 13 September 2014.
  2. John Alan Robinson CV, upm.es, access date 12 August 2016
  3. "John Alan Robinson, Obituary". The New York Times. 17 August 2016. Retrieved 2 November 2019.
  4. Emeriti Faculty, Engineering and Computer Science, Syracuse University, accessed 2 November 2019.
  5. The Coq Development Team (18 October 2018). The Coq Reference Manual: Release 8.10+alpha (PDF). p. 3. Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 October 2018. Retrieved 19 October 2018. Automated theorem-proving was pioneered in the 1960s by Davis and Putnam in propositional calculus. A complete mechanization (in the sense of a semidecision procedure) of classical first-order logic was proposed in 1965 by J.A. Robinson, with a single uniform inference rule called resolution. Resolution relies on solving equations in free algebras (i.e. term structures), using the unification algorithm. Many refinements of resolution were studied in the 1970s, but few convincing implementations were realized, except of course that PROLOG is in some sense issued from this effort.
  6. AMS Automatic Theorem Proving Prizes
  7. AAAI Fellows List
  8. "Herbrand Award 1996: J. Alan Robinson". Archived from the original on 7 March 2007. Retrieved 13 January 2007.
  9. "CADE Herbrand Award". Archived from the original on 13 September 2014. Retrieved 13 September 2014.
  10. ALP awards
  11. KU Leuven honorary doctorates overview 1966–2012
  12. "Honorary doctorates - Uppsala University, Sweden". 9 June 2023.
  13. UP Madrid honorary doctorates 1973–2013
  14. UP Madrid honorary doctorate for John Alan Robinson, Oct 1st, 2003
  15. "Profile of John Alan Robinson in the Humboldt network". www.humboldt-foundation.de. Retrieved 2 November 2019.
  16. Leonhard Wolfgang Bibel (2017), Reflexionen vor Reflexen - Memoiren eines Forschers (in German) (1 ed.), Göttingen: Cuvillier Verlag, ISBN 9783736995246
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