Corrado Boehm

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Corrado Böhm (born January 17, 1923 in Milan ; † October 23, 2017 ) was an Italian theoretical computer scientist and computer pioneer. He was a professor at La Sapienza University (Rome).

life and work

Boehm was in 1942 in Switzerland, made in 1946 with a degree in electrical engineering from the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (then EPUL) and then became a research assistant at the ETH Zurich , where his turn to computer science began when evaluating the Zuse Z4 by Konrad Zuse , the was installed at the ETH in 1950. He received his doctorate there in 1952 in mathematics with Eduard Stiefel (and Paul Bernays , who introduced him to Turing machines ) (Calculatrices digitales du déchiffrage de formules logico-mathématiques par la machine même dans la conception du program) . In it he described a complete compiler and, moreover, was the first to describe what was later called a metacircular compiler, i.e. a compiler that was formulated in his own language. He also developed a computer for symbolic manipulation, described in an Italian patent in 1952.

In 1951 he went back to Italy, first to Olivetti , then in 1953 to the Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo (IAC) of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche in Rome (directed by Mauro Picone ), where the first modern Italian computer was created in collaboration with the company Ferranti from Manchester was installed (FINAC), for whose evaluation Böhm was responsible. Afterwards he was responsible for the programming of analysis applications at the IAC.

In the 1960s he began teaching at the University of Rome (and the University of Pisa ) and turned to theoretical computer science. With his student Giuseppe Jacopini, he demonstrated a sentence named after them in 1966, which became one of the foundations of structured programming (also known as programming without a Goto command after Edsger W. Dijkstra ). Böhm-Jacopini's theorem states that only by alternately using (1) linear sequences of commands, (2) branches and (3) loops | Repetitions | Iterations in the program flowchart shown algorithms every calculable function can be described.

Also in the 1960s he began with the lambda calculus of Alonzo Church to deal with based on it functional programming languages . In 1968 he proved Böhm's important theorem; that two expressions of the lambda calculus with syntactically different normal forms regarding β-conversion and η-conversion cannot be identical. The method of proof he used (Böhm out technique) was also influential. With Wolf Gross, he developed a functional programming language based on Church's lambda calculus and the combinatorial logic of Haskell Brooks Curry (CUCH).

With Dana Scott , Christopher Strachey and others, he was also a member of Working Group 2.2 of IFIP (Formal description of programming concepts) from 1964 .

In 1968 he was given a full professorship in Modena and then at the University of Turin , where he built up the computer science department (initially consisting of a single room and using an IBM 360 that also served the other faculties) and a group in theoretical computer science. From 1974 he was a professor in Rome, where he organized an international conference on the lambda calculus that same year . From 1988 he was active in the newly founded IFIP Working Group Functional Programming . His research over the last few decades highlighted the concept of normalization as a paradigm in programming, especially in functional programming.

He was an honorary doctor of the University of Milan (1994). In 2001 he received the EATCS award . Böhm was a member of the Academia Europaea .

He was co-editor of Theoretical Computer Science.

In 1950 he married the painter Eva Romanin Jacur, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. Corrado Böhm died in October 2017 at the age of 94.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ È morto Corrado Boehm. In: ilpost.it , accessed October 25, 2017
  2. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project. Published as Calculatrices digitales. Du déchiffrage des formules mathématiques par la machine même dans la conception du program , Annali di Mat. Pura e applicata, series IV, volume 37, 1954, pp. 1–51. The dissertation was submitted in 1951.
  3. ^ Donald Knuth : Pardo The early development of programming languages. In: Metropolis, Howlett, Gian-Carlo Rota (eds.): A history of computing in the 20th century , Annals of the history of computing, 1980, pp. 197-268.
  4. ↑ Böhm, Jacopini: Flow Diagrams, Turing Machines and Languages ​​with Only Two Formation Rules , Communications of the ACM, Volume 9, 1966, pp. 366-371.
  5. ^ Böhm: Alcune proprietà delle forme normali nel calcolo , INAC 696 (1968).
personal data
SURNAME Bohm, Corrado
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian theoretical computer scientist and computer pioneer
DATE OF BIRTH January 17, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Milan
DATE OF DEATH 23 October 2017