Turing Award Winners

The winner of the prestigious Turing Award for achievement in the Computer Science field has been announced.

Peter Naur, a Danish scientist, was part of the team that created the ALGOL 60 programming language, which was influential on almost all procedural languages that followed it, including Pascal and modern languages like Java as well.

He also developed BNF ("Backus-Naur Form") for the expression of context free grammars. It is still used, in various forms, to describe syntax today.

It's a little late for him to receive this award, but he certainly deserves it.

A list of previous Turing Award recipients can be found here.

Peter Naur photo

They raised the Turing Award prize money from $100,000 to $250,000. The increased funding came from Google (news story).

We should all nominate ourselves, just in case, now that it's worth so much to win!

The Turing Award winner for 2006 was Frances E. Allen, an IBM Fellow, for pioneering work in optimizing compiler techniques.

The Turing Award winners for 2007 are:

for their work in systems modeling and hardware and software verification techniques.

The Turing Award winner for 2008 was Barbara Liskov at M.I.T., who was one of the early developers of modular programming techniques and abstract data types.

Hooray for women in computing!

obeygiant said:

Doctor Q, just wondering if your doctoral thesis was something exciting like artificial intelligence and face detection or something more mundane like scalable match algorithms or graphical probabilitistic models?

probabilitistic is too fun to say!

Click to expand...

My doctoral dissertation was about an obscure area of programming language design, of interest only to theoreticians. (Is "theoreticians" a fun word to say too?) The dissertation has been cited in other work, so that's the only proof I have that it wasn't entirely useless.

My Master's thesis was equally obscure, defining a programming language using a method called the Vienna Definition Language. Too bad I didn't get to go to Vienna for my research!

The 2009 Turing Award winner was Charles Thacker, for his "pioneering design and realization of the first modern personal computer -- the Alto at Xerox PARC -- and seminal inventions and contributions to local area networks (including the Ethernet), multiprocessor workstations, snooping cache coherence protocols, and tablet personal computers."



The 1974 Alto was the first modern personal computer with a bitmapped screen and a WYSIWYG interface with menus, icons, and a built-in mouse. It could even network!



Thacker was a co-inventor of Ethernet and worked on the team that created the first laser printer.

He was lead developer of the first computer to use semiconductor memory and the first multiprocessor workstation.

In the 1980s he invented snooping cache coherence protocols. For those who don't hear that phrase very often, it refers to the way a multiprocessor will listen for updates to another multiprocessor's cache so it can remove out-of-date information from its own cache.

And if that wasn't enough, he worked on the first tablet computer prototypes at Microsoft. I guess we should credit him for the iPad!

The 2010 Turing Award winner is Dr. Leslie G. Valiant at Harvard, for his work in computer intelligence, including a landmark paper "A Theory of the Learnable" on computational learning theory.

His research was the basis for much software we know today, including email spam filters, speech recognition, handwriting recognition, computer vision, and IBM's Watson computer system (see Watson thread and Ken Jennings thread).

The 2011 Turing Award went to Judea Pearl for his contributions to artificial intelligence, primarily his invention of Bayesian networks.



The 2012 Turing Award is going to Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali for their work in the theoretic foundations of cryptography and the application of complexity theory.

Goldwasser is an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Micali is an MIT professor of engineering.

Their research showed that cryptographic security must be computational and should be classified by degree of breaking difficulty. They developed fundamental primitives of encryption and digital signatures and made advances in random functions, interactive proofs, and zero-knowledge protocols. Lots of cool stuff to look up if you want to read more!

The 2013 Turing Award went to Leslie Lamport for his contributions to distributed and concurrent systems.



Lamport works for Microsoft Research and has previously won awards for his work in distributed computing, concurrent programming, and fault-tolerant computing. Among the concepts he pioneered are causality and logical clocks, replicated state machines, and sequential consistency.

What it means:

The 2014 Turing Award is going to Michael Stonebraker of the M.I.T Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He also co-founded the Intel Science and Technology Center for Big Data. He was formerly a Computer Science professor at U.C. Berkeley.

He pioneered many widely adopted concepts in database systems, created some of the first relational databases -- Ingres and Postgres -- and founded nine separate companies, including, Paradigm4, Tamr, Vertica, and VoltDB.

Congratulations Professor Stonebraker!

The 2015 Turing Award ("the Nobel Prize of computing") is going to Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman, both from Stanford, for their invention in 1976 of public-key cryptography, which is still the basis of much of our Internet security today. It's certainly appropriate to give them this award while cryptography is in the news.

They will split a $1 million cash prize. Diffie plans to use his half on a project to document the history of cryptography. Hellman plans to write a book on peace and sustainability.

The 2016 Turing Award recipient is Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World-Wide Web and leader of the World Wide Web Consortium.


While at CERN, he invented URLs, the HTTP protocol, the HTML language, and the first web browser. The first website, at CERN, was launched August 6, 1991. It's hard to imagine the world without these inventions, the billions of websites that resulted, and the billions of people using them.

From the press release:

There are two 2017 Turing Award recipients, both from California:


They are being recognized for "developing a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures."

Their pioneering work led to the widespread use of RISC (reduced instruction set computer) systems, which are now almost universal.

Their designs weren't just about using fewer instructions. They designed computer architectures by finding the right balance among factors such as power consumption, heat dissipation, and off-chip communication.

They co-authored an influential book about their methods: Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach.

The 2018 Turing Award goes to

• Yoshua Bengio, Director of the Artificial Intelligence Institute in Quebec
• Geoffrey Hinton, Google Engineering Fellow
• Yann LeCun, Facebook Chief AI Scientist

for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs in deep neural networks. Their work has led to advances in computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, and robotics.


When you ride in your self-driving car, get an intelligent answer from your Apple, Amazon, or Google device, or have your household robot make you lunch, it's partly due to their work. We're certainly come a long way since John McCarthy's pioneering AI work.

Gutwrench said:

Any chance I’ll be recognized for my work in careless queries resulting in cartesian products?

Maybe the coveted @Chown33 Award?

Click to expand...

If we can't all be computing pioneers, maybe we should strive to have a medical condition named after us.

The 2019 Turning Award Winners are Pixar's Edwin Catmull and Patrick Hanrahan, for their pioneering work in 3-D computer graphics.


Their conceptual, software, and hardware innovations led to the current state-of-the-art in CGI for film, video games, virtual reality, and augmented reality.

Catmull developed the foundations of Z-buffering and texture mapping and later created the surface patch method used in animation and movie special effects. He was hired by Steve Jobs as President of Pixar.

Hanrahan developed light field rendering, subsurface scattering for portraying skin and hair, and global illumination for rendering.

This obituary is a worthy read: Frances Allen, first woman to win Turing Award for contributions to computing, dies at 88

Frances Allen was born in 1932 and grew up on a farm during the Depression, without electricity, plumbing or central heating. She was happy to work as a high school math teacher, and attended the University of Michigan to get a master's degree for her teaching certification. She took a "temporary" job at IBM to earn enough to repay her school debts, but ended up with IBM for 45 years.

Her assignment teaching FORTRAN led to her interest in compiler optimization, where she became one of the pioneers in that specialty, and also in parallel computing. She won her Turing Award in 2006 (see post #3 in this thread) and died on her 88th birthday.

The 2020 Turing Award winners are Alfred Aho, Computer Science professor (emeritus) at Columbia University, and Jeffrey Ullman, Computer Science professor (emeritus) at Stanford University.

Both earned doctoral degrees at Princeton University. They worked together at Bell Labs and subsequently collaborated in studying compiler construction, theoretical design of algorithms, and programming practices.

Their books have been used in Computer Science education for decades.

The 2021 Turning Award winner is Jack J. Dongarra, a researcher and professor at a number of universities. Over a distinguished career, he has published hundreds of articles, papers, and reports, contributed greatly to libraries of numerical algorithms, established standards for mathematical software, and received numerous awards. High-performance computing owes much to his research and algorithms.