Vaughan Pratt

Vaughan Pratt, born on 12 April 1944, is a computer scientist and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He was raised in Australia and educated at Knox Grammar School and the University of Sydney, where his 1970 master's thesis dealt with what is now called natural language processing. He then moved to the United States and completed a Stanford doctorate in twenty months under Donald Knuth, on the Shellsort algorithm and sorting networks. He taught at MIT from 1972 and at Stanford from 1981, becoming professor emeritus in 2000. His name is attached to the Knuth-Morris-Pratt string searching algorithm, to Pratt certificates, which show that primality testing lies in NP, to the top-down operator precedence method known as the Pratt parser, and to dynamic logic, which he developed in 1976. He directed the Stanford SUN workstation project, worked with the young Sun Microsystems and designed its ambigram logo. His later research concerns formal models of concurrent systems and Chu spaces.