  Michael Gordon was a pioneer in the field of interactive theorem proving and
hardware verification. In the 1970s, he had the vision of formally verifying
system designs, proving their correctness using mathematics and logic. He
demonstrated his ideas on real-world computer designs. His students extended
the work to such diverse areas as the verification of floating-point
algorithms, the verification of probabilistic algorithms and the verified
translation of source code to correct machine code. He was elected to the Royal
Society in 1994, and he continued to produce outstanding research until
retirement.
  His achievements include his work at Edinburgh University helping to create
Edinburgh LCF, the first interactive theorem prover of its kind, and the ML
family of functional programming languages. He adopted higher-order logic as a
general formalism for verification, showing that it could specify hardware
designs from the gate level right up to the processor level. It turned out to
be an ideal formalism for many problems in computer science and mathematics.
His tools and techniques have exerted a huge influence across the field of
formal verification.
