R. Nigel Horspool[1] is a retired professor of computer science, formerly of the University of Victoria.
Horspool is co-inventor of dynamic Markov compression and was associate editor and then editor-at-large of the journal Software: Practice and Experience from 2007 to 2017.
After a public school education at Monmouth School, he studied at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he received a BA in natural science, but specializing in theoretical physics, in 1969.
After two years employment as an assembly language programmer on a partially successful air traffic control system project, he went to the University of Toronto for an MSc followed by a PhD in computer science.
As of July 2016, he retired from the university but retains the title of professor emeritus.