Introduction
Michael Burrows, FRS (born 1963) is a British computer scientist and the creator of the Burrows–Wheeler transform currently working for Google. Born in Britain, he now lives in the United States, although remaining a British citizen.
Education
Burrows was educated at Manchester Grammar School and did his undergraduate degree in Electronic Engineering with Computer Science at University College London and then completed his PhD in the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, where he was a postgraduate student of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Career
Upon leaving Cambridge, he worked at the Systems Research Center (SRC) at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) where, with Louis Monier, he was one of the two main creators of AltaVista.
Following Compaq's acquisition of DEC, Burrows worked briefly for Microsoft. Shortly thereafter he went to Google.
After his early work at the University of Cambridge, where he researched micro-kernels and basic matters of security, he went on to enlarge upon that work as systems were deployed at large scale on the Internet.
During his employment at Google, Burrows has studied concurrency and synchronisation, and for programming in the large – especially with respect to the C++ language.
Awards and honors
Burrows was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2013. His nomination reads: