Olivier Danvy (nonfiction)

Olivier Danvy is a French computer scientist specializing in programming languages, partial evaluation, and continuations. He is a Professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

Danvy received his PhD degree from the Université Paris VI in 1986. He is notable for the number of scientific papers which acknowledge his help. Writing in Nature, editor Declan Butler reports on an analysis of acknowledgments on nearly one third of a million scientific papers and reports that Danvy is "the most thanked person in computer science".

Danvy himself is quoted as being "stunned to find my name at the top of the list", ascribing his position to a "series of coincidences": he is multidisciplinary, is well travelled, is part of an international PhD programme, is a networker, and belongs to a university department with a long tradition of having many international visitors.

Fiction cross-reference

• Crimes against mathematical constants
• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Computer science (nonfiction)
• Continuation (nonfiction) - an abstract representation of the control state of a computer program. A continuation implements (reifies) the program control state, i.e. the continuation is a data structure that represents the computational process at a given point in the process's execution; the created data structure can be accessed by the programming language, instead of being hidden in the runtime environment. Continuations are useful for encoding other control mechanisms in programming languages such as exceptions, generators, coroutines, and so on.

External links:

• Olivier Danvy @ Wikipedia