Robert W Floyd (June 8, 1936 – September 25, 2001) was an eminent computer scientist.
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.
Becoming a computer operator in the early 1960s, he began publishing many noteworthy papers and was appointed an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon Uni...
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Robert W Floyd (June 8, 1936 – September 25, 2001) was an eminent computer scientist.
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.
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.
His contributions include the design of Floyd's algorithm, which efficiently finds all shortest paths in a graph, and work on parsing. In one isolated paper he introduced the important concept of error diffusion for rendering images, also called Floyd-Steinberg dithering (though he distinguished dithering from diffusion).
A significant achievement was pioneering the field of program verification using...
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