Robert W. Floyd - Life

Life

Born in New York, Floyd finished school at age 14. At the University of Chicago, he received a Bachelor's degree in liberal arts in 1953 (when still only 17) and a second Bachelor's degree in physics in 1958.

Floyd became a staff member of the Armour Research Foundation (now IIT Research Institute) at Illinois Institute of Technology in the 1950s. Becoming a computer operator in the early 1960s, he began publishing many noteworthy papers and was appointed an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University by the time he was 27 and became a full professor at Stanford University six years later. He obtained this position without a Ph.D.

He received the Turing Award in 1978 "for having a clear influence on methodologies for the creation of efficient and reliable software, and for helping to found the following important subfields of computer science: the theory of parsing, the semantics of programming languages, automatic program verification, automatic program synthesis, and analysis of algorithms".

Floyd worked closely with Donald Knuth, in particular as the major reviewer for Knuth's seminal book The Art of Computer Programming, and is the person most cited in that work. He was the co-author, with Richard Beigel, of the textbook The Language of Machines: an Introduction to Computability and Formal Languages (1994, W.H. Freeman and Company, ISBN 978-0-7167-8266-7). Floyd supervised 7 PhD graduates.

Floyd married and divorced twice, including with computer scientist Christiane Floyd, and he had four children. His hobbies included hiking and he was an avid backgammon player:

We once were stuck at the Chicago O’Hare airport for hours, waiting for our flight to leave, owing to a snow storm. As we sat at our gate, Bob asked me, in a casual manner, “do you know how to play backgammon?” I answered I knew the rules, but why did he want to know? Bob said since we had several hours to wait perhaps we should play a few games, for small stakes of course. He then reached into his briefcase and removed a backgammon set.

My Dad taught me many things. One was to be wary of anyone who suggests a game of pool for money, and then opens a black case and starts to screw together a pool stick. I figured that this advice generalized to anyone who traveled with their own backgammon set. I told Bob that I was not going to play for money, no way. He pushed a bit, but finally said fine. He proceeded instead to give me a free lesson in the art and science of playing backgammon.

I was right to pass on playing him for money—at any stakes. The lesson was fun. I found out later that for years he had been working on learning the game. He took playing backgammon very seriously, studied the game and its mathematics, and was a near professional. I think it was more than a hobby. Like his research, Bob took what he did seriously, and it is completely consistent that he would be terrific at backgammon. —Richard J. Lipton