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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