Alain Colmerauer
French computer scientist (1941–2017) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
French computer scientist (1941–2017) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Alain Colmerauer (24 January 1941 – 12 May 2017) was a French computer scientist. He was a professor at Aix-Marseille University, and the creator of the logic programming language Prolog.
Alain Colmerauer | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 24 January 1941 Carcassonne, France |
| Died | 12 May 2017 (aged 76) Marseille, France |
| Known for | Prolog |
| Spouse | Colette Coursaget |
| Children | 3 |
| Scientific career | |
| Thesis | Precedences, analyse syntaxique et langages de programmation (1967) |
| Doctoral advisor | Louis Bolliet, Jean Kuntzman |
Alain Colmerauer was born on 24 January 1941 in Carcassonne.[1] He graduated from the Grenoble Institute of Technology,[2] and he earned a PhD from the Ensimag in Grenoble.[3]
Colmerauer spent 1967–1970 as assistant professor at the University of Montreal,[3] where he created Q-Systems, one of the earliest linguistic formalisms used in the development of the TAUM-METEO machine translation prototype.[2] Developing Prolog III in 1984, he was one of the main founders of the field of constraint logic programming.[2]
Colmerauer became an associate professor at Aix-Marseille University in Luminy in 1970. He was promoted to full professor in 1979. From 1993 to 1995, he was head of the Laboratoire d'Informatique de Marseille (LIM), a joint laboratory of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, the Université de Provence and the Université de la Méditerranée.[3] Despite retiring as emeritus professor in 2006,[3] he remained a member of the artificial intelligence taskforce in Luminy.[4]
Colmerauer won an award from the regional council of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, and in 1985 the Michel Monpetit Award, from the French Academy of Sciences.[5] In 1986, he was made a knight of the Legion of Honour by the French government.[3] He became Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 1991,[6] and in 1997 the Association for Logic Programming bestowed upon him and fourteen other select researchers the title of Founder of Logic Programming.[7] He then received the Association for Constraint Programming's Research Excellence Award in 2008.[8] He was also a correspondent of the French Academy of Sciences in the area of mathematics.[9]
The ALP Alain Colmerauer Prolog Heritage Prize (in short: the Alain Colmerauer Prize)[13] is organized by the Association for Logic Programming (ALP). The Prize is given for recent accomplishments and practical advances in Prolog-inspired computing, understood in a broad sense, where foundational, technological, and practical contributions are eligible with proven evidence or potential for the future development of Logic Programming.
