Mark Burgess (computer scientist)

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Mark Burgess is a researcher and writer at Oslo University College in Norway, who is well known for work in computer science in the field of policy-based configuration management.

Mark Burgess was born in Maghull in the United Kingdom to English parents on February 19th 1966. He grew up in Bloxham, a small village in Oxfordshire from the age of 5-18, attending Bloxham Primary School, Warriner Secondary School and Banbury Upper School.

Originally interested in physics and astronomy, he went to study astrophysics at the (then) School of Physics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, where he later switched to pure Physics and then Theoretical Physics for his bachelor degree. He stayed on to obtain a PhD in Theoretical Physics in Newcastle, in the field of Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking in Non-Abelian Gauge Theories, for which he received the Runcorn Prize.

After completing a doctorate he pursued a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Oslo in Norway and has lived in Oslo ever since. While at Oslo he developed an interest in the behaviour of computers as dynamic systems and began to apply ideas from physics to describe computer behaviour.

Mark Burgess is perhaps best known as the author of the popular configuration management software package cfengine, but has also made important contributions to the theory of the field of automation and policy based management, including the idea of operator convergence and promise theory.

[edit] Publications

Mark Burgess is the author of a number of books

Paged ROM programming for the BBC Micro, (Dabs Press - never printed), 1985.
C, Dabs Press 1988
C, (Third Edition) Dabs Press 1992
C Tutorial (Fourth edition), Free Software Foundation, 2000
AmigaDOS, Dabs Press 1989
Classical Covariant Fields, Cambridge University Press, 2002
Principles of Network and System Administration, J. Wiley \& Sons. 2000
Selected Papers in Network and System Administration, J. Wiley \& Sons. 2001 (Editor, with E. Anderson and A. Couch.)
Principles of Network and System Administration (Second edition), J. Wiley \& Sons. 2003
Analytical Network and System Administration (Human-Computer management), J. Wiley \& Sons. (2004)
Handbook of Network and System Adminisration, Elsevier 2007, (Editor with Jan Bergstra)