Richard Bird (computer scientist)

Richard Simpson Bird (13 February 1943 – 4 April 2022)^[1] was an English computer scientist.

Richard Simpson Bird
Professor Richard S. Bird
Born	(1943-02-13)13 February 1943 London, England
Died	4 April 2022(2022-04-04) (aged 79)
Known for	Algorithm design Functional programming Bird–Meertens formalism
Scientific career
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	University of Reading University of Oxford
Website	www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/richard.bird

Posts

He was a Supernumerary Fellow of Computation at Lincoln College, University of Oxford, in Oxford England,^[2] and former director of the Oxford University Computing Laboratory (now the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford).^[3] Formerly, Bird was at the University of Reading.

Research interests

Bird's research interests lay in algorithm design and functional programming, and he was known as a regular contributor to the Journal of Functional Programming, and as author of several books promoting use of the programming language Haskell, including Introduction to Functional Programming using Haskell,^[4] Thinking Functionally with Haskell,^[5] Algorithm Design with Haskell co-authored with Jeremy Gibbons,^[6] and other books on related topics.^[7][8] His name is associated with the Bird–Meertens formalism, a calculus for deriving programs from specifications in a functional programming style.

Other organisational affilitations

He was a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi,^[9] which specified, supports, and maintains the programming languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.^[10]