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Alain Colmerauer

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Alain Colmerauer
Born(1941-01-24)24 January 1941
Carcassonne, France
Died12 May 2017(2017-05-12) (aged 76)
Marseille, France
Known forProlog
SpouseColette Coursaget
Children3
Scientific career
Thesis Precedences, analyse syntaxique et langages de programmation  (1967)
Doctoral advisorLouis Bolliet, Jean Kuntzman

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.

Early life

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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]

Career

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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]

Death

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Colmerauer died on 12 May 2017.[3][10][11][12]

The ALP Alain Colmerauer Prize

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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.

References

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  1. ^ "Colmerauer, Alain (1941-....)". IdRef. Retrieved 19 May 2017.
  2. ^ a b c Cohen, Jacques (November 2001). "A Tribute to Alain Colmerauer". Theory and Practice of Logic Programming. 1 (6): 637–646. arXiv:cs/0402058. doi:10.1017/S1471068401001119. S2CID 7946933.
  3. ^ a b c d e f "In Memoriam: Alain Colmerauer". Association for Logic Programming. 15 May 2017. Archived from the original on 8 April 2023. Retrieved 18 May 2017.
  4. ^ Colmerauer, Alain. Retrieved 19 May 2017 – via Bibliothèque nationale de France.
  5. ^ "PRIX DE COMMISSIONS". La Vie des sciences. 1985. Retrieved 19 May 2017 – via Bibliothèque nationale de France.
  6. ^ "ELECTED AAAI FELLOWS". American Association of Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved 19 May 2017.
  7. ^ "ALP Awards | Association for Logic Programming". 13 April 2013. Archived from the original on 13 April 2013. Retrieved 8 July 2023.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  8. ^ "Research Excellence Award". Association for Constraint Programming. Retrieved 19 May 2017.
  9. ^ "Alain Colmerauer". Académie des sciences. Retrieved 19 May 2017.
  10. ^ Fisher, Lawrence M. "In Memoriam Alain Colmerauer: 1941–2017". Communications of the ACM. ACM. Retrieved 23 May 2017. — According to this obituary, Alain Colmerauer died on 15 May.
  11. ^ lemonde.fr (in French)
  12. ^ ensimag.grenoble-inp.fr (in French)
  13. ^ "The ALP Alain Colmerauer Prize". Association for Logic Programming. Retrieved 5 July 2024.
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