Robert Clay Prim III (September 25, 1921 – November 18, 2021) was an American mathematician and computer scientist.
in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin,[2] where he also met his wife Alice (Hutter) Prim (1921–2009), whom he married in 1942.
During the climax of World War II (1941–1944), Prim worked as an engineer for General Electric.
Also during his tenure at Bell Labs, Robert Prim assisted the Weapons Reliability Committee at Sandia National Laboratory chaired by Walter McNair in 1951.
During his career at Bell Laboratories, Robert Prim along with coworker Joseph Kruskal developed two different algorithms (see greedy algorithm) for finding a minimum spanning tree in a weighted graph, a basic stumbling block in computer network design.