Speech by Robin Milner on receiving an Honorary Degree from the University of Bologna Speech by Robin Milner on receiving an Honorary Degree from the University of Bologna Outline I am deeply honoured to receive the Degree that has been conferred on me. I would like to spend a few minutes talking about the way that computer science is developing from a study of tools for computation into a broad science of interactive behaviour, and I shall illustrate it with my own work which is very much a part of the development. My research in computing has been always concerned with language. I don't mean natural language, but the more formal language which we use in controlling and analysing discrete dynamic systems - in other words, in controlling computers. Every tool designed by man is a prosthetic device, and for every prosthetic device there is a means of control.
Many tools are physical, and their control is manual.
Quite simply, the versatility of computers is exactly equal to the versatility of the languages by which we prescribe their behaviour, and this appears to be unbounded. It follows that the terms in which the computer behaviour is prescribed must harmonize with the way we describe information flow in such systems. Thus computing expands into informatics , the science of information and communication. So it is appropriate in this place to propose a new way in which mathematics can inform the study of communication. Define an extremely powerful language for programming which not only encourages people to write correctly, but whose meaning is defined completely and lucidly by mathematics, not by a users' manual.