Always enjoy aviation stuff. Do not know if I cam across him in my many years of education and independent study.

In this case, Boid is spelled differently and has been defined as:

Boids is an artificial life program, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, which simulates the flocking behaviour of birds. His paper on this topic was published in 1987 in the proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH conference. [1] The name "boid" corresponds to a shortened version of "bird-oid object", which refers to a bird-like object.[2] Incidentally, "boid" is also a New York Metropolitan dialect pronunciation for "bird".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids

I did not find anything about John Richard Boyd in NYC. If he is responsible, this would have likely been the place.

Incidentally, Google Search defines "oid" as:

forming adjectives and nouns denoting an animal belonging to a higher taxon with a name ending in -oidea.
"hominoid"

Love aviation networking.