Born in
New York City, Floyd finished high school at age 14. At the
University of Chicago, he received a
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in
liberal arts in 1953 (when still only 17) and a second
bachelor's degree in
physics in 1958. Floyd was a college roommate of
Carl Sagan. Floyd became a staff member of the Armour Research Foundation (now
IIT Research Institute) at
Illinois Institute of Technology in the 1950s. Becoming a computer operator in the early 1960s, he began publishing many papers, including on
compilers (particularly
parsing). He was a pioneer of
operator-precedence grammars, and is credited with initiating the field of
programming language semantics in . He was appointed an associate professor at
Carnegie Mellon University by the time he was 27 and became a full professor at
Stanford University six years later. He obtained this position without a
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree. He was a member of the
International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP)
IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi, which
specified, maintains, and supports the
programming languages
ALGOL 60 and
ALGOL 68. He was elected a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974. He received the
Turing Award in 1978 "for having a clear influence on methodologies for the creation of efficient and reliable software, and for helping to found the following important subfields of computer science: the theory of parsing, the
semantics of programming languages, automatic
program verification, automatic
program synthesis, and
analysis of algorithms". Floyd worked closely with
Donald Knuth, in particular as the major reviewer for Knuth's seminal book
The Art of Computer Programming, and is the person most cited in that work. He was co-author, with Richard Beigel, of the textbook
The Language of Machines: an Introduction to Computability and Formal Languages. Floyd supervised seven Ph.D. graduates. Floyd married and divorced twice, first with Jana M. Mason and then computer scientist
Christiane Floyd, and he had four children. In his last years he suffered from
Pick's disease, a
neurodegenerative disease, and thus retired early in 1994. His hobbies included hiking, and he was an avid
backgammon player: == Selected publications ==