Richard Simpson Bird (4 February 1943 – 4 April 2022) was an English computer scientist.

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He was a Supernumerary Fellow of Computation at Lincoln College, University of Oxford, in Oxford England, and former director of the Oxford University Computing Laboratory (now the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford). Formerly, Bird was at the University of Reading.

Research interests

Bird's research interests lay in algorithm design and functional programming, and he was known as a regular contributor to the Journal of Functional Programming, and as author of several books promoting use of the programming language Haskell, including Introduction to Functional Programming using Haskell, Thinking Functionally with Haskell, Algorithm Design with Haskell co-authored with Jeremy Gibbons, and other books on related topics. His name is associated with the Bird–Meertens formalism, a calculus for deriving programs from specifications in a functional programming style.

Other organisational affilitations

He was a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi, which specified, supports, and maintains the programming languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.