Gordon David Plotkin (born 9 September 1946)[8] is a theoretical computer scientist in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.

[1] Plotkin has remained at Edinburgh, and was, with Burstall and Robin Milner, a co-founder of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science (LFCS).

[18][19][20][21] His former doctoral students include Luca Cardelli,[3] Philippa Gardner,[4] Doug Gurr,[5] Eugenio Moggi,[6] and Lǐ Wèi.

"[24] His nomination for the Royal Society reads: Plotkin has contributed to Artificial Intelligence, Logic, Linguistics and especially to Computer Science.

His main general contribution has been to establish a semantic framework for Computer Science, especially programming languages.