Corrado Böhm

Corrado Böhm (17 January 1923 – 23 October 2017) was an Italian computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Rome "La Sapienza", known especially for his contributions to the theory of structured programming, constructive mathematics, combinatory logic, lambda calculus, and the semantics and implementation of functional programming languages.

In his PhD dissertation (in Mathematics, at ETH Zurich, 1951; published in 1954), Böhm describes for the first time a full meta-circular compiler, that is a translation mechanism of a programming language, written in that same language.

His most influential contribution is the so-called structured program theorem, published in 1966 together with Giuseppe Jacopini.

Together with Alessandro Berarducci, he demonstrated an isomorphism between the strictly-positive algebraic data types and the polymorphic lambda-terms, otherwise known as Böhm–Berarducci encoding.

He is the recipient of the 2001 EATCS Award for a distinguished career in theoretical computer science.