Turing Award

computer science award
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Also known as: A. M. Turing Award
In full:
A.M. Turing Award
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computer science

Turing Award, annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a professional computing society founded in 1947, to one or more individuals “selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community.” The Turing Award is often referred to as the computer science equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

The Turing Award is named for Alan Mathison Turing, an English pioneer in computers and artificial intelligence. The first recipient of the award, in 1966, was Alan J. Perlis, an American computer scientist who wrote the compiler for the ALGOL computer programming language. The first woman to win the prize was Frances E. Allen, in 2006, for her work in compiler optimization, which contributed to the development of parallel execution in multiprocessing. The youngest recipient was Donald Knuth, who was 36 when he received the award in 1974 for his work on algorithms and computer programming. The oldest recipient was Alfred Vaino Aho, who was 79 when he received the award in 2020 for his work on algorithms and the theory of programming language implementation.

Intel Corporation began funding the Turing Award in 2002, and in 2007 Google Inc. joined in funding the award. The prize money was raised to $250,000 that year and then to $1,000,000 in 2014.

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A list of Turing Award winners is provided in the table.

A.M. Turing Award winners
year name nationality area of achievement
1966 Perlis, Alan J. American compiler for the ALGOL programming language
1967 Wilkes, Maurice V. British EDSAC, the first stored-program computer
1968 Hamming, Richard W. American Hamming codes for error detection and error correction
1969 Minsky, Marvin L. American artificial intelligence
1970 Wilkinson, James H. British numerical analysis on supercomputers
1971 McCarthy, John American artificial intelligence
1972 Dijkstra, Edsger W. Dutch programming languages, including ALGOL
1973 Bachman, Charles W. American database technology
1974 Knuth, Donald E. American computer algorithms and programming languages
1975 Newell, Allen American artificial intelligence
1975 Simon, Herbert A. American artificial intelligence
1976 Rabin, Michael O. German nondeterministic machines
1976 Scott, Dana S. American nondeterministic machines
1977 Backus, John American programming languages, including FORTRAN
1978 Floyd, Robert W. American programming languages, including automatic program verification
1979 Iverson, Kenneth E. Canadian programming languages, including APL
1980 Hoare, C. Antony R. British programming languages
1981 Codd, Edgar F. British programming languages
1982 Cook, Stephen A. American theory of NP-complete problems
1983 Ritchie, Dennis M. American operating systems, including UNIX
1983 Thompson, Kenneth L. American operating systems, including UNIX
1984 Wirth, Niklaus E. Swiss programming languages, including PASCAL
1985 Karp, Richard M. American theory of algorithms and study of NP-complete problems
1986 Hopcroft, John E. American algorithms and data structures
1986 Tarjan, Robert E. American algorithms and data structures
1987 Cocke, John American compilers and microprocessors
1988 Sutherland, Ivan American computer graphics
1989 Kahan, William Canadian numerical analysis
1990 Corbato, Fernando J. American time-sharing systems, including CTSS and Multics
1991 Milner, A.J. Robin British machine-assisted proof construction
1992 Lampson, Butler W. American distributed computing
1993 Hartmanis, Juris Latvian-American computational complexity theory
1993 Stearns, Richard E. American computational complexity theory
1994 Feigenbaum, Edward American artificial intelligence
1994 Reddy, Raj Indian artificial intelligence
1995 Blum, Manuel American computational complexity theory
1996 Pnueli, Amir Israeli temporal logic in computing
1997 Engelbart, Douglas American computer mouse and multiple windows
1998 Gray, Jim American databases and transaction processing
1999 Brooks, Frederick P. American computer architecture, operating systems, and software engineering
2000 Yao, Andrew Chi-Chih Chinese theory of computations
2001 Dahl, Ole-Johan Norwegian object-oriented programming languages
2001 Nygaard, Kristen Norwegian object-oriented programming languages
2002 Adleman, Leonard M. American public-key cryptography
2002 Rivest, Ronald L. American public-key cryptography
2002 Shamir, Adi Israeli public-key cryptography
2003 Kay, Alan American object-oriented programming languages, including Smalltalk
2004 Cerf, Vinton American Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)
2004 Kahn, Robert E. American Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)
2005 Naur, Peter Danish programming languages, including ALGOL 60
2006 Allen, Frances E. American compiler optimization and automatic parallel execution
2007 Clarke, Edmund M. American model checking software
2007 Emerson, E. Allen American model checking software
2007 Sifakis, Joseph French model checking software
2008 Liskov, Barbara J.H. American programming languages and system design
2009 Thacker, Charles P. American Alto, the first personal computer
2010 Valiant, Leslie American computational learning theory
2011 Pearl, Judea Israeli- American artificial intelligence
2012 Goldwasser, Shafi Israeli- American cryptography
2012 Micali, Silvio American computational complexity
2013 Lamport, Leslie American analysis of algorithms and proof construction
2014 Stonebraker, Michael American databases
2015 Diffie, Whitfield American cryptography
2015 Hellman, Martin American cryptography
2016 Berners-Lee, Tim British HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and the World Wide Web
2017 Hennessy, John L. American computer architecture
2017 Patterson, David American computer architecture
2018 Bengio, Yoshua Canadian artificial intelligence
2018 Hinton, Geoffrey Canadian artificial intelligence
2018 LeCun, Yann American artificial intelligence
2019 Catmull, Edwin E. American 3D computer graphics
2019 Hanrahan, Patrick M. American 3D computer graphics
2020 Aho, Alfred Vaino American algorithms and theory underlying programming language implementation
2020 Ullman, Jeffrey David American algorithms and theory underlying programming language implementation
2021 Dongarra, Jack American algorithms and software
2022 Metcalfe, Bob American Ethernet
William L. Hosch