Nigel Horspool

R. Nigel Horspool is a British-born Canadian computer scientist and retired professor at the University of Victoria. He invented the Boyer-Moore-Horspool algorithm, a fast string search method adapted from the Boyer-Moore algorithm, and he is a co-inventor of dynamic Markov compression. He studied natural science at Pembroke College, Cambridge, worked as an assembly language programmer on an air traffic control project, and then took his master's and doctoral degrees in computer science at the University of Toronto. After seven years teaching at McGill University he moved to Victoria in 1983, retiring in 2016 with the title of professor emeritus. He edited the journal Software: Practice and Experience and wrote C Programming in the Berkeley UNIX Environment.