C. A. R. Hoare

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Charles Antony Richard Hoare

Born January 11, 1934 (1934-01-11) (age 74)
Colombo, Sri Lanka
Fields Computer Scientist
Institutions Elliott Brothers
Queen's University of Belfast
Oxford University
Moscow State University
Microsoft Research
Alma mater Oxford University
Moscow State University
Known for Quicksort
Hoare logic
CSP
Notable awards ACM Turing Award

Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (Tony Hoare or C.A.R. Hoare, born January 11, 1934) is a British computer scientist, probably best known for the development of Quicksort (or Hoaresort), the world's most widely used sorting algorithm[citation needed], in 1960. He also developed Hoare logic for verifying program correctness, and the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) used to specify the interactions of concurrent processes (including the Dining philosophers problem) and the inspiration for the Occam programming language.

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[edit] Biography

Born in Colombo (Ceylon, now Sri Lanka) to British parents, he received his Bachelor's degree in Classics from the University of Oxford (Merton College) in 1956. He remained an extra year at Oxford studying graduate-level statistics, and following his National Service in the Royal Navy (1956–1958). When he learned to speak Russian, he studied computer translation of human languages at Moscow State University in the Soviet Union in the school of Kolmogorov.

In 1960, he left the Soviet Union and began working at Elliott Brothers, Ltd, a small computer manufacturing firm, where he implemented ALGOL 60 and began developing algorithms in earnest.[1] He became a Professor of Computing Science at the Queen's University of Belfast in 1968, and in 1977 moved back to Oxford as a Professor of Computing to lead the Programming Research Group in the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, following the death of Christopher Strachey. He is now an Emeritus Professor there, and is also a senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England.

He is also the originator of the famous quote, "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil." At times, this quote has been attributed to Donald Knuth, who popularized it.[2]

[edit] Awards

[edit] Books

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b C.A.R. Hoare (February 1981). "The emperor's old clothes" (PDF). Communications of the ACM 24 (2): 5–83. doi:10.1145/358549.358561. ISSN 0001-0782. 
  2. ^ Hyde, Randall (2006-06-27). The Fallacy of Premature Optimization. ACM Ubiquity. Retrieved on 2008-05-13.

[edit] External links

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A. M. Turing Award laureates

Perlis (1966) · Wilkes (1967) · Hamming (1968) · Minsky (1969) · Wilkinson (1970) · McCarthy (1971) · Dijkstra (1972) · Bachman (1973) · Knuth (1974) · Newell / Simon (1975) · Rabin / Scott (1976) · Backus (1977) · Floyd (1978) · Iverson (1979) · Hoare (1980) · Codd (1981) · Cook (1982) · Thompson / Ritchie (1983) · Wirth (1984) · Karp (1985) · Hopcroft / Tarjan (1986) · Cocke (1987) · Sutherland (1988) · Kahan (1989) · Corbató (1990) · Milner (1991) · Lampson (1992) · Hartmanis / Stearns (1993) · Feigenbaum / Reddy (1994) · Blum (1995) · Pnueli (1996) · Engelbart (1997) · Gray (1998) · Brooks (1999) · Yao (2000) · Dahl / Nygaard (2001) · Rivest / Shamir / Adleman (2002) · Kay (2003) · Cerf / Kahn (2004) · Naur (2005) · Allen (2006) · Clarke / Emerson / Sifakis (2007)


Persondata
NAME Hoare, Charles Antony Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION Computer Science
DATE OF BIRTH January 11, 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH Colombo, Sri Lanka
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH