Talk:Robert W. Floyd

Floyd-Steinberg error diffusion

A personal story, not suitable for the encyclopedia entry:

One year somewhat late in his career I bumped into Bob Floyd at the supermarket, and we struck up a conversation. My contacts years earlier had been about parsing, but later I concentrated on computer graphics. He asked me if there was any interest in that old paper he had published about error diffusion, and seemed genuinely surprised to hear it had become a staple! He told me that he had looked at woodcuts and engraving techniques and tried to design an automatic technique for approximating shading with black and white that gave a similar appearance.

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: page moved. Vegaswikian (talk) 22:27, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

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Bob Floyd → Robert W. Floyd —

An editor recently moved this page from Robert Floyd to Bob Floyd, so as to add a disambiguation page at Robert Floyd. Under the policy at WP:COMMONNAME, the article title should be the name by which Floyd was most commonly known in reliable sources. This is certainly "Robert W. Floyd", not "Bob Floyd". To take just a few of the most important sources currently cited in the article itself: his Stanford obituary, "Computer pioneer Robert Floyd dead at 65"; his Turing Award citation; Knuth's obituary in ACM SIGACT News, R. J. Lipton's recollection of Floyd. All give his name first as "Robert Floyd" or "Robert W. Floyd", and change to "Bob Floyd" only in personal reminiscences, if at all. His papers were published under the name "Robert W. Floyd" or "R. W. Floyd", never "Bob Floyd"; for example Assigning Meaning to Programs. —Mark Dominus (talk) 04:06, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

• Support - nominator's arguments make a lot of sense, and a quick search bears it out.  — Amakuru (talk) 08:36, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
• Either Bob Floyd or Robert W. Floyd. I did not move this page "as to add a disambiguation page at Robert Floyd", there is no disambiguation page at Robert Floyd? Clearly Robert Floyd was a worse choice for the title than Bob Floyd (the name he apparently was know by to colleagues, I can give many sources) or Robert W. Floyd (the name you will find him listed under in bibliographies, I can give many sources). For some reason it seems Wikipedia prefers the first over the latter (e.g. Donald Knuth not Donald E. Knuth, probably as not having to give his name as Floyd, Robert W (Bob), as is common in other biographical reference works), —Ruud 12:00, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
• Support. I tried all three names in quotes in Google Books, coupling with various false-positive limiters ("Computer scientist"; "turing award"; algorithm). The results massively favor Robert or Robert W. over Bob as to commonality, and are about evenly split between the two fuller names, with the initialized version having a slight edge.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 23:55, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Curious phrasings

"Born in New York City, Floyd finished school at age 14. At the University of Chicago, he received a Bachelor's degree in liberal arts in 1953 (when still only 17) and a second bachelor's degree in physics in 1958."

So clearly he was still in school after 14! Is it meant that he finished high school at 14?

"Becoming a computer operator in the early 1960s, he began publishing many noteworthy papers, including compilers (particularly parsing)."

Is this supposed to say "papers on compilers"? Because a compiler is not a paper! GeneCallahan (talk) 14:44, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

External links modified

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• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20120312235958/http://histsoc.stanford.edu/pdfmem/Floyd_Robert.pdf to http://histsoc.stanford.edu/pdfmem/Floyd_Robert.pdf

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