Turing Award

The **ACM A.M. Turing Award** is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community". It is named after Alan Turing and is given each year in New York City. It is the highest award that could be given to a computer scientist. and the "Nobel Prize of computing".

## History

The first Turing Award was given in 1966 to Alan Perlis, a teacher at Carnegie Mellon University. It has been given every year since.

The first recipient, in 1966, was Alan Perlis, of Carnegie Mellon University. Frances E. Allen of IBM, in 2006, was the first female recipient in the award's forty-year history.

## Recipients

|style="width:10px"|Year|style="width:150px"|Recipient|Photo|Rationale|
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
|Alan Perlis||For his influence in the area of advanced computer programming techniques and compiler construction.||||
|Maurice Wilkes||Wilkes is best known as the builder and designer of the EDSAC, the first computer with an internally stored program. Built in 1949, the EDSAC used a mercury delay line memory. He is also known as the author, with Wheeler and Gill, of a volume on "Preparation of Programs for Electronic Digital Computers" in 1951, in which program libraries were effectively introduced.||||
|Richard Hamming||For his work on numerical methods, automatic coding systems, and error-detecting and error-correcting codes.||||
|Marvin Minsky||For his central role in creating, shaping, promoting, and advancing the field of artificial intelligence.||||
|James H. Wilkinson||For his research in numerical analysis to facilitate the use of the high-speed digital computer, having received special recognition for his work in computations in linear algebra and "backward" error analysis.||||
|John McCarthy||McCarthy's lecture "The Present State of Research on Artificial Intelligence" is a topic that covers the area in which he has achieved considerable recognition for his work.||||
|Edsger W. Dijkstra||Edsger Dijkstra was a principal contributor in the late 1950s to the development of the ALGOL, a high level programming language which has become a model of clarity and mathematical rigor. He is one of the principal proponents of the science and art of programming languages in general, and has greatly contributed to our understanding of their structure, representation, and implementation. His fifteen years of publications extend from theoretical articles on graph theory to basic manuals, expository texts, and philosophical contemplations in the field of programming languages.||||
|Charles Bachman||For his outstanding contributions to database technology.||||
|Donald Knuth||For his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to "The Art of Computer Programming" through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title.||||
|Allen Newell||rowspan=2|In joint scientific efforts extending over twenty years, initially in collaboration with J. C. Shaw at the RAND Corporation, and subsequently with numerous faculty and student colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, they have made basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing.|||
|Herbert A. Simon||||||
|Michael O. Rabin||rowspan=2|For their joint paper "Finite Automata and Their Decision Problem," which introduced the idea of nondeterministic machines, which has proved to be an enormously valuable concept. Their (Scott & Rabin) classic paper has been a continuous source of inspiration for subsequent work in this field.|||
|Dana Scott||||||
|John Backus||For profound, influential, and lasting contributions to the design of practical high-level programming systems, notably through his work on FORTRAN, and for seminal publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages.||||
|Robert W. Floyd||For having a clear influence on methodologies for the creation of efficient and reliable software, and for helping to found the following important subfields of computer science: the theory of parsing, the semantics of programming languages, automatic program verification, automatic program synthesis, and analysis of algorithms.||||
|Kenneth E. Iverson||For his pioneering effort in programming languages and mathematical notation resulting in what the computing field now knows as APL, for his contributions to the implementation of interactive systems, to educational uses of APL, and to programming language theory and practice.||||
|Tony Hoare||For his fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages.||||
|Edgar F. Codd||For his fundamental and continuing contributions to the theory and practice of database management systems, esp. relational databases.||||
|Stephen Cook||For his advancement of our understanding of the complexity of computation in a significant and profound way.||||
|Ken Thompson||rowspan=2|For their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system.|||
|Dennis Ritchie||||||
|Niklaus Wirth||For developing a sequence of innovative computer languages, EULER, ALGOL-W, MODULA and Pascal.||||
|Richard M. Karp||For his continuing contributions to the theory of algorithms including the development of efficient algorithms for network flow and other combinatorial optimization problems, the identification of polynomial-time computability with the intuitive notion of algorithmic efficiency, and, most notably, contributions to the theory of NP-completeness.||||
|John Hopcroft||rowspan=2|For fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures.|||
|Robert Tarjan||||||
|John Cocke||For significant contributions in the design and theory of compilers, the architecture of large systems and the development of reduced instruction set computers (RISC).||||
|Ivan Sutherland||For his pioneering and visionary contributions to computer graphics, starting with Sketchpad, and continuing after.||||
|William Kahan||For his fundamental contributions to numerical analysis. One of the foremost experts on floating-point computations. Kahan has dedicated himself to "making the world safe for numerical computations."||||
|Fernando J. Corbató||For his pioneering work organizing the concepts and leading the development of the general-purpose, large-scale, time-sharing and resource-sharing computer systems, CTSS and Multics.||||
|Robin Milner||For three distinct and complete achievements: 1) LCF, the mechanization of Scott's Logic of Computable Functions, probably the first theoretically based yet practical tool for machine assisted proof construction; 2) ML, the first language to include polymorphic type inference together with a type-safe exception-handling mechanism; 3) CCS, a general theory of concurrency. In addition, he formulated and strongly advanced full abstraction, the study of the relationship between operational and denotational semantics.||||
|Butler W. Lampson||For contributions to the development of distributed, personal computing environments and the technology for their implementation: workstations, networks, operating systems, programming systems, displays, security and document publishing.||||
|Juris Hartmanis||rowspan=2|In recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory.|||
|Richard E. Stearns||||||
|Edward Feigenbaum||rowspan=2|For pioneering the design and construction of large scale artificial intelligence systems, demonstrating the practical importance and potential commercial impact of artificial intelligence technology.|||
|Raj Reddy||||||
|Manuel Blum||In recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its application to cryptography and program checking.||||
|Amir Pnueli||For seminal work introducing temporal logic into computing science and for outstanding contributions to program and systems verification.||||
|Douglas Engelbart||For an inspiring vision of the future of interactive computing and the invention of key technologies to help realize this vision.||||
|Jim Gray||For seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation.||||
|Frederick P. Brooks||For landmark contributions to computer architecture, operating systems, and software engineering.||||
|Andrew Yao||In recognition of his fundamental contributions to the theory of computation, including the complexity-based theory of pseudorandom number generation, cryptography, and communication complexity.||||
|Ole-Johan Dahl||rowspan=2|For ideas fundamental to the emergence of object-oriented programming, through their design of the programming languages Simula I and Simula 67.|||
|Kristen Nygaard||||||
|Ron Rivest||rowspan=3|For their ingenious contribution for making public-key cryptography useful in practice.|||
|Adi Shamir||||||
|Leonard Adleman||||||
|Alan Kay||For pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing.||||
|Vint Cerf||rowspan=2|For pioneering work on internetworking, including the design and implementation of the Internet's basic communications protocols, TCP/IP, and for inspired leadership in networking.|||
|Bob Kahn||||||
|Peter Naur||For fundamental contributions to programming language design and the definition of ALGOL 60, to compiler design, and to the art and practice of computer programming.||||
|Frances E. Allen||For pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of optimizing compiler techniques that laid the foundation for modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel execution.||||
|Edmund M. Clarke||rowspan=3|For their roles in developing model checking into a highly effective verification technology, widely adopted in the hardware and software industries.|||
|E. Allen Emerson||||||
|Joseph Sifakis||||||
|Barbara Liskov||For contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing.||||
|Charles P. Thacker||For his pioneering design and realization of the Xerox Alto, the first modern personal computer, and in addition for his contributions to the Ethernet and the Tablet PC.||||
|Leslie Valiant||For transformative contributions to the theory of computation, including the theory of probably approximately correct (PAC) learning, the complexity of enumeration and of algebraic computation, and the theory of parallel and distributed computing.||||
|Judea Pearl||For fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning.||||
|Silvio Micali||rowspan=2|For transformative work that laid the complexity-theoretic foundations for the science of cryptography and in the process pioneered new methods for efficient verification of mathematical proofs in complexity theory.|||
|Shafi Goldwasser||||||
|Leslie Lamport||For fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems, notably the invention of concepts such as causality and logical clocks, safety and liveness, replicated state machines, and sequential consistency.<nowiki/>||||
|Michael Stonebraker||For fundamental contributions to the concepts and practices underlying modern database systems.||||
|Whitfield Diffie||rowspan=2|For fundamental contributions to modern cryptography. Diffie and Hellman's groundbreaking 1976 paper, "New Directions in Cryptography," introduced the ideas of public-key cryptography and digital signatures, which are the foundation for most regularly-used security protocols on the Internet today.|||
|Martin Hellman||||||
|Tim Berners-Lee||For inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale.||||
|John L. Hennessy||rowspan=2|For pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures with enduring impact on the microprocessor industry.|||
|David Patterson||||||
|Yoshua Bengio||rowspan=3|For conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.|||
|Geoffrey Hinton||||||
|Yann LeCun||||||
|Edwin Catmull||rowspan=2|For fundamental contributions to 3-D computer graphics, and the revolutionary impact of these techniques on computer-generated imagery (CGI) in filmmaking and other applications.|||
|Pat Hanrahan||||||
|Alfred Aho||rowspan=2|For fundamental algorithms and theory underlying programming language implementation and for synthesizing these results and those of others in their highly influential books, which educated generations of computer scientists.|||
|Jeffrey Ullman||||||
|Jack Dongarra||For pioneering contributions to numerical algorithms and libraries that enabled high performance computational software to keep pace with exponential hardware improvements for over four decades.||||
|Robert Metcalfe||For the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet.||||
|Avi Wigderson||for Foundational Contributions to the Theory of Computation.||||

## Other websites

- ACM List of Turing Laureates
- Visualizing Turing Award Laureates