In Memoriam Alain Colmerauer: 1941-2017

Artificial intelligence pioneer Alain Colmerauer passed away on May 12. Alain Colmerauer, a French computer scientist and a father of the logic programming language Prolog, passed away on May 15 at the age of 76. Alain Marie Albert Colmerauer was born in the French town of Carcassonne on Jan. 24, 1941. He earned a degree in computer science from the Institut polytechnique de Grenoble (Grenoble Institute of Technology) in 1963, and a doctorate in the discipline in 1967 from the École nationale supérieure d'informatique et de mathématiques appliquées de Grenoble, which is part of the Institut. The newly minted doctor spent 1967–1970 as assistant professor at the University of Montreal, where he created Q-Systems, a method of directed graph transformations according to given grammar rules. Colmerauer moved to the University of Aix-Marseille at Luminy in 1970 as Professeur 2ème classe (associate professor).