Corrado Böhm

Corrado Böhm (17 January 1923 to 23 October 2017) was an Italian computer scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Rome La Sapienza, regarded as one of the founding fathers of Italian computer science. In his 1951 doctoral dissertation at ETH Zurich, published in 1954, he described for the first time a full meta-circular compiler, a translation mechanism for a programming language written in that same language. His most influential result, published in 1966 with his student Giuseppe Jacopini, is the Böhm-Jacopini theorem, which proved that any flowchart-representable algorithm can be expressed using only sequential composition, conditional branching and iteration, providing the theoretical foundation for structured programming. He also contributed to combinatory logic and lambda calculus, and, with Alessandro Berarducci, established what became known as the Böhm-Berarducci encoding, relating algebraic data types to polymorphic lambda terms. He received the EATCS Award in 2001 for his contributions to theoretical computer science.