Rod Burstall

Rodney Martineau Burstall (11 November 1934 – 13 February 2025) was a British computer scientist who was one of four founders of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh.

Biography Burstall studied physics at the University of Cambridge, then an M.Sc. in operational research at the University of Birmingham. He worked for three years before returning to Birmingham University to earn a Ph.D. in 1966 with thesis titled Heuristic and Decision Tree Methods on Computers: Some Operational Research Applications under the supervision of N. A. Dudley and K. B. Haley. Burstall retired in 2000, becoming Professor Emeritus.

In 2009, he was awarded the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGPLAN Programming Language Achievement Award.

Burstall died on 13 February 2025, at the age of 90.

Books May 1971: Programming in POP-11, Edinburgh University Press. 1980: (with Alan Bundy) Artificial Intelligence: An Introductory Course, Edinburgh University Press. 1988: (with D. E. Rydeheard) Computational Category Theory, Prentice-Hall.