Edgar Codd, Key Theorist of Databases, Dies at 79

April 23, 2003
By KATIE HAFNER

Edgar F. Codd, a mathematician and computer scientist who
laid the theoretical foundation for relational databases,
the standard method by which information is organized in
and retrieved from computers, died on Friday at his home in
Williams Island, Fla. He was 79.

The cause was heart failure, said his wife, Sharon B. Codd.

Computers can store vast amounts of data. But before Dr.
Codd's work found its way into commercial products,
electronic databases were "completely ad hoc and
higgledy-piggledy," said Chris Date, a database expert and
former business partner of Dr. Codd's, who was known as
Ted.

Dr. Codd's idea, based on mathematical set theory, was to
store data in cross-referenced tables, allowing the
information to be presented in multiple permutations. For
instance, a user could ask the computer for a list of all
baseball players from both the National League and the
American League with batting averages over .300.

Relational databases now lie at the heart of systems
ranging from hospitals' patient records to airline flights
and schedules.

While working as a researcher at the I.B.M. San Jose
Research Laboratory in the 1960's and 70's, Dr. Codd wrote
several papers outlining his ideas. To his frustration,
I.B.M. largely ignored his work, as the company was
investing heavily at the time in commercializing a
different type of database system.

"His approach was not, shall we say, welcomed with open
arms at I.B.M.," said Harwood Kolsky, a physicist who
worked with Dr. Codd at I.B.M. in the 1950's and 60's. "It
was a revolutionary approach."

It was not until 1978 that Frank T. Cary, then chairman and
chief executive of I.B.M., ordered the company to build a
product based on Dr. Codd's ideas. But I.B.M. was beaten to
the market by Lawrence J. Ellison, a Silicon Valley
entrepreneur, who used Dr. Codd's papers as the basis of a
product around which he built a start-up company that has
since become the Oracle Corporation.

"The sad thing is that Ted never became rich out of his
idea," Mr. Date said. "Other people did, but not Ted."

Edgar Frank Codd was born the youngest of seven children in
Portland Bill, in Dorset, England, in 1923. His father was
a leather manufacturer, his mother a schoolteacher.

He attended Oxford University on a full scholarship,
studying mathematics and chemistry. During World War II, he
was a pilot with the Royal Air Force. In 1948 he moved to
New York and, hearing that I.B.M. was hiring
mathematicians, obtained a job there as a researcher.

A few years later, in 1953, angered by Senator Joseph R.
McCarthy's pursuit of Americans he said had Communist ties
or sympathies, Dr. Codd moved to Ottawa for several years.

After returning to the United States, he began graduate
studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where
he received his doctorate in computer science in 1965. In
1967, he moved to California to work in the I.B.M. San Jose
Research Laboratory.

He and his first wife, Elizabeth, were divorced in 1978. In
1990, Dr. Codd married Sharon Weinberg, a mathematician and
I.B.M. colleague.

In 1981, he received the A. M. Turing Award, the highest
honor in the computer science field.

Dr. Codd is survived by his wife, of Williams Island; a
daughter, Katherine Codd Clark of Palo Alto, Calif.; three
sons, Ronald, of Alamo, Calif., Frank, of Castro Valley,
Calif., and David, of Boca Raton, Fla.; and six
grandchildren.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/23/obituaries/23CODD.html?ex=1052103355&ei=1&en=f53b4f126ed6419c

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
--
Tom Brandt
Northtech Systems, Inc.
130 S. 1st Street, Suite 220
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1343
http://www.northtech.com/

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