Professor Vaughan Pratt
"[Professor Pratt] managed the Stanford University Network (SUN) workstation project, and helped found Sun Microsystems in 1982."
Vaughan Pratt studied at Sydney University taking double honours in pure mathematics and physics and a master's degree in computer science. He entered Stanford University's Ph.D. program in October 1970 and graduated in January 1972 with a thesis on Shellsort supervised by Donald Knuth. From 1972 to 1982 he was assistant then associate professor at MIT, and since then has been a full professor at Stanford. He proved that the primes are in NP, and with Knuth and Morris developed the first linear time pattern matcher. He developed LINGOL, a natural language programming language that was used at ETL Tokyo to construct the front end of a Japanese-to-English translator. In 1976 he introduced dynamic logic, a combination of modal logic and regular expressions for reasoning about computational and other behavior, and simplified it to the modal mu-calculus in 1981.
While on sabbatical from MIT he managed the Stanford University Network (SUN) workstation project, and helped found Sun Microsystems in 1982. He designed the Sun logo, and designed and implemented Pixrect, a common object-oriented interface to all Sun's frame buffers. His publications span computational linguistics, algorithms, logics of programs and behavior, programming languages, computer graphics, digital typography, concurrency, and foundations of mathematics. Since 1990 he has been developing a common foundation for computation and mathematics based on the principle of dual interaction as realized by Chu spaces.