Dr. Robert Clay Prim

An American mathematician and computer scientist, he was born in Sweetwater, Texas). He received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1941, and in 1949, he received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University. He worked at Princeton University from 1948 until 1949 as a research associate. During the climax of World War II (1941?1944), he worked as an engineer for General Electric and from 1944 until 1949, he was hired by the United States Naval Ordnance Lab as an engineer and later a mathematician. At Bell Laboratories, he served as director of mathematics research from 1958 to 1961. There, he developed Prim's algorithm. Along with coworker Joseph Kruskal, they developed two different algorithms (see greedy algorithm) for finding a minimum spanning tree in a weighted graph, a basic stumbling block in computer network design. His self-named algorithm developed by him in1957 was originally discovered in 1930 by mathematician Vojtěch Jarn?k and it was later rediscovered by Edsger Dijkstra in 1959. It is sometimes referred to as the DJP algorithm or the Jarn?k algorithm. After Bell Laboratories, he became vice president of research at Sandia National Laboratories.