Robert W. Floyd

Robert W. Floyd was an American computer scientist who became a full professor at Stanford University despite never earning a doctorate. He designed the Floyd Warshall algorithm for finding shortest paths between every pair of points in a graph, devised Floyd Steinberg dithering, a widely used technique for rendering images with a limited color palette, and, in his 1967 paper Assigning Meanings to Programs, pioneered the use of logical assertions to prove that a program behaves correctly, work that helped found what became known as Hoare logic. He received the 1978 Turing Award for these and related contributions across parsing theory, programming language semantics and the analysis of algorithms.