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Read Jos Baeten's "A Brief History of Process Algebra"

16 January 2004

In my previous posting, I discussed Steven Weinberg's advice to:

...learn something about the history of science, or at a minimum the history of your own branch of science.

Of course, learning the history of one's branch of science is made easier by the availability of good publications. As a process algebraist with a keen interest in the development of ideas in this beautiful area of research, it gives me great pleasure to use this posting to advertise the piece A Brief History of Process Algebra that is available from Jos Baeten's publications page. This piece, that is based on Jos' inaugural talk at the workshop Process Algebra: Open Problems and Future Directions (July 21-25, 2003, University of Bologna Residential Center, Bertinoro (Forlė), Italy) presents his personal account of the history of process algebra, and is currently being revised by the author in light of the comments he is receiving from members of the research community. (The slides on which Jos' talk was based are available in volume NS-03-03 of the BRICS Notes Series.)

Writing this kind of general article requires great care, and I feel that we should thank Jos for writing this piece by reading it and commenting on it. I myself have enjoyed browsing through the current version of piece, and learned from it. Did you know that Hans Bekic introduced the left-merge operation, and gave early accounts of the classic expansion theorem? I, for one, did not before hearing Jos talk in Bertinoro, and reading his "brief history".