To his disappointment, IBM proved slow to exploit his suggestions until commercial rivals started implementing them. In the 1960s and 1970s, he worked out his theories of data arrangement, issuing his paper 'A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks' in 1970, after an internal IBM paper one year earlier. His design for a self-replicating computer was implemented only in 2010. His thesis was about self-replication in cellular automata, extending on work of von Neumann and showing that a set of eight states was sufficient for universal computation and construction. Work Ĭodd received a PhD in 1965 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, advised by John Henry Holland.

Ĭodd died of heart failure at his home in Williams Island, Florida, at the age of 79 on 18 April 2003. Ĭodd received the Turing Award in 1981, and in 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. During the 1990s, his health deteriorated and he ceased work. Two years later, he moved to San Jose, California, to work at IBM's San Jose Research Laboratory, where he continued to work until the 1980s. In 1957, he returned to the US working for IBM and from 1961 to 1965 pursuing his doctorate in computer science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In 1953, angered by Senator Joseph McCarthy, Codd moved to Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Codd first worked for the company’s Selective Sequence Electronic (SSEC) project and was later involved in the development of IBM 701 and 702. In 1948, he moved to New York to work for IBM as a mathematical programmer. After attending Poole Grammar School, he studied mathematics and chemistry at Exeter College, Oxford, before serving as a pilot in the RAF Coastal Command during the Second World War, flying Sunderlands. Biography Įdgar Frank Codd was born in Fortuneswell, on the Isle of Portland in Dorset, England.

He made other valuable contributions to computer science, but the relational model, a very influential general theory of data management, remains his most mentioned, analyzed and celebrated achievement. Propagation, Computation, and Construction in Two-dimensional cellular spaces (1965)Įdgar Frank ' Ted' Codd (19 August 1923 – 18 April 2003) was an English computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases and relational database management systems.

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