Carnegie Mellon will host the 27th Conference on the Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics May 25-28. The meeting will include a special session honoring John Reynolds, professor of computer science, and marking his 75th birthday.

One of the conference organizers, Stephen Brookes, professor of computer science, noted this isn't the first time a major Reynolds birthday has been celebrated by the MFPS series, which focuses on areas of mathematics, logic and computer science related to models of computation and the semantics of programming languages.

"He's been a major contributor to this series since...well, forever," Brookes said. "His work has been enormously influential in shaping the field and has been the source of inspiration for many researchers."

Not coincidentally, Brookes added, many of the papers to be presented during the meeting involve separation logic, a framework for reasoning about programs that Reynolds developed with Peter O'Hearn, professor of computer science at Queen Mary, University of London. Separation logic began as way of reasoning about sequential programs operating on shared mutable data structures and has grown to become a significant research area, with applications to automated software analysis and concurrent program verification.

About 50 people are expected to attend the conference, which provides a forum for researchers in mathematics and computer science to exchange ideas. Edmund Clarke, professor of computer science, will be among the speakers at a special session on systems biology.