Chairman at Stanford University (without a Masters)

by Hla Min

Updated : June 2025

He attended the University of Chicago. He has two Bachelor degrees. He completed BA in 1953 at the age of 17. He finished BS in 1958 after working and studying part-time.
In most US universities, one needs a doctorate to be an Assistant Professor.
Floyd is an exception. He was appointed Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in 1965. Stanford University lured him in 1968 and promoted him to Full Professor in 1970. In 1973, he was appointed Chairman, Department of Computer Science at Stanford University.
He supervised Ph.D. candidates.
Floyd received numerous awards including the prestigious ACM Turing Award, which is considered the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in Computer Science.
Professor Donald Knuth (ACM Turing Award Winner, Author of “The Art of Computer Programming”, “TeX & MetaFont”) recommended Floyd for the Chair.
Floyd had been a major reviewer of Knuth’s Classic Texts. Knuth said, “Floyd had published 13+ seminal papers. Every one of them is worthy of a Doctorate.”

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