free variable

LtU links to a Nature article in which Olivier Danvy of U. Aarhus is identified as the “most thanked” computer scientist:

[Danvy] is the most thanked person in computer science, according to an automated analysis of almost half-a-million acknowledgements in science papers.

The technique, which relies on text-mining software, offers a new way to investigate the influence of individuals, research agencies and companies within different areas of science.

Personally, I’d like to thank Prof. Danvy for the extremely cute “Functional Unparsing” paper, which uses higher-order functions and the CPS transformation to produce an efficient, typesafe printf function without dependent types. Danvy has authored many papers that have had greater impact, of course, but “Functional Unparsing” is a well-written description of a clever and elegant solution to a real problem — the sort of work anyone would be proud of.