Alan Jay Perlis

Alan Jay Perlis (born April 1, 1922, Pittsburgh, Pa., U.S.—died Feb. 7, 1990, New Haven, Conn.) was an American mathematician and computer scientist. He was the first winner, in 1966, of the A.M. Turing Award, given by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and recognized internationally as the highest honour in computer science. In particular, Perlis was cited for “his influence in the area of advanced programming techniques and compiler construction.” Perlis was one of the most important individuals in establishing computer science as a distinct academic field.

In 1943 Perlis earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). During World War II, Perlis served in the U.S. Army Air Forces in Europe. Following the war Perlis earned a master’s degree (1949) and a doctorate (1950) in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked on Whirlwind, the first real-time computer.

In 1952 Perlis became a mathematics professor and the first director of the computing laboratory at Purdue University. Perlis returned to the Carnegie Institute as director of the school’s computation centre (1956–60), chairman of the mathematics department (1960–64), and chairman of the computer science department (1965–71). The ACM in 1957 appointed Perlis chairman of a committee to establish a higher-level computer programming language. ALGOL, as the new language was later named, led to Pascal, which remains a widely used scientific programming language.

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In 1971 Perlis became the Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science at Yale University, when he served as chair of the computer science department (1976–80) except for during the 1977–78 academic year, when he was at the California Institute of Technology. He remained at Yale for the rest of his life.

In 1982 Perlis wrote “Epigrams on Programming” for the SIGPLAN Notices of the ACM, which described in simple epigrams his philosophy of computer programming. Some of the Zen-like aphorisms include:

• Optimization hinders evolution.
• To understand a program you must become both the machine and the program.
• A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.

Perlis was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He was the first editor (1958–62) of Communications of the ACM and president of the ACM from 1962 to 1964.