Vaughan Pratt

Vaughan Ronald Pratt (born 1944), a Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, was one of the earliest pioneers in the field of computer science. Publishing since 1969, Pratt has made several contributions to foundational areas such as search algorithms, sorting algorithms, and primality testing. More recently his research has focused on formal modeling of concurrent systems and Chu spaces. A pattern of applying models from diverse areas of mathematics such as geometry, linear algebra, abstract algebra, and especially mathematical logic to computer science pervades his work.

Career

Raised in Australia, Pratt attended Sydney University where he completed his masters thesis in 1970, related to what is now known as natural language processing. He then went to the United States, where he completed a Ph.D. thesis at Stanford University in only 20 months under the supervision of advisor Donald Knuth. His thesis focused on analysis of the shellsort sorting algorithm and sorting networks.

Pratt was an Assistant Professor at MIT (1972 to 1976) and then Associate Professor (1976 to 1982). In 1974, working in collaboration with Knuth and Morris, Pratt completed and formalized work he had begun in 1970 as a graduate student at Berkeley; the coauthored result was the Knuth-Morris-Pratt pattern matching algorithm. In 1976, he developed the system of dynamic logic, a modal logic of structured behavior.

He went on sabbatical from MIT to Stanford (1980 to 1981), and was appointed a full...
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