Quick Facts
Biography
Corrado Böhm (born 17 January 1923), Professor Emeritus at the University of Rome "La Sapienza", is a computer scientist known especially for his contributions to the theory of structured programming, constructive mathematics, combinatory logic, lambda-calculus, and the semantics and implementation of functional programming languages.
Work
In his PhD dissertation (in Mathematics, at ETH Zurich, 1951; published in 1954), Böhm describes for the first time a full meta-circular compiler, that is a translation mechanism of a programming language, written in that same language. His most influential contribution is the so-called structured program theorem, published in 1966 together with Giuseppe Jacopini. In lambda-calculus, he established an important separation theorem between normal forms. Together with Alessandro Berarducci, he demonstrated an isomorphism between the strictly-positive algebraic data types and the polymorphic lambda-terms, otherwise known as Böhm–Berarducci encoding.
A special issue of Theoretical Computer Science was dedicated to him in 1993, on his 70th birthday. He is the recipient of the 2001 EATCS Award for a distinguished career in theoretical computer science.
Selected publications
- C. Böhm, "Calculatrices digitales. Du déchiffrage des formules mathématiques par la machine même dans la conception du programme", Annali di Mat. pura e applicata, serie IV, tomo XXXVII, 1–51, 1954. PDF at ETH Zürich English translation 2016 by Peter Sestoft
- C. Böhm, "On a family of Turing machines and the related programming language", ICC Bull., 3, 185–194, July 1964.
- Introduced P′′, the first imperative language without GOTO to be proved Turing-complete.
- C. Böhm, G. Jacopini, "Flow diagrams, Turing Machines and Languages with only Two Formation Rules", Comm. of the ACM, 9(5): 366–371,1966.
- C. Böhm, "Alcune proprietà delle forme normali nel K calcolo", Pubbl. INAC, n. 696, Roma, 1968.
- C. Böhm, A. Berarducci, "Automatic Synthesis of typed Lambda-programs on Term Algebras", Theoretical Computer Science, 39: 135–154, 1985.
- C. Böhm, "Functional Programming and Combinatory algebras", MFCS, Carlsbad, Czechoslovakia, eds M.P. Chytil, L. Janiga and V. Koubek, LNCS 324, 14–26, 1988.