Turing Award

The A.M. Turing Award is given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to a person selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field. Most of the recipients have been computer scientists.

The award is named after Alan Mathison Turing, a British mathematician considered to be one of the fathers of modern computer science.

The Turing Award is often recognized as the "Nobel Prize of computing"[1]. It is sponsored by Intel Corporation and currently is accompanied by a prize of $100,000.

The award recipients and the fields in which they earned the recognition are listed below. Refer to the individual recipients for more detailed information on their achievements.

Turing Award recipients

Year	Recipients	Citation
1966	Alan J. Perlis	For his influence in the area of advanced programming techniques and compiler construction
1967	Maurice V. Wilkes	Professor 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
1968	Richard Hamming	For his work on numerical methods, automatic coding systems, and error-detecting and error-correcting codes
1969	Marvin Minsky	artificial intelligence
1970	James H. Wilkinson	For his research in numerical analysis to facilitiate the use of the high-speed digital computer, having received special recognition for his work in computations in linear algebra and "backward" error analysis
1971	John McCarthy	Dr. 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
1972	Edsger Dijkstra	Edsger Dijkstra was a principal contributor in the late 1950's 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 exponents 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
1973	Charles W. Bachman	For his outstanding contributions to database technology
1974	Donald E. 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
1975	Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon	In joint scientific efforts extending over twenty years, initially in collaboration with J. C. Shaw at the RAND Corporation, and subsequentially 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
1976	Michael O. Rabin and Dana S. Scott	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
1977	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
1978	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
1979	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
1980	C. Antony R. Hoare	For his fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages
1981	Edgar F. Codd	For his fundamental and continuing contributions to the theory and practice of database management systems, esp. relational databases
1982	Stephen A. Cook	For his advancement of our understanding of the complexity of computation in a significant and profound way
1983	Ken Thompson and Dennis M. Ritchie	For their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system
1984	Niklaus Wirth	For developing a sequence of innovative computer languages, EULER, ALGOL-W, MODULA and PASCAL
1985	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
1986	John Hopcroft and Robert Tarjan	For fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures
1987	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)
1988	Ivan Sutherland	For his pioneering and visionary contributions to computer graphics, starting with Sketchpad, and continuing after
1989	William (Velvel) 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."
1990	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.
1991	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.
1992	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.
1993	Juris Hartmanis and Richard E. Stearns	In recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory.
1994	Edward Feigenbaum and Raj Reddy	For pioneering the design and construction of large scale artificial intelligence systems, demonstrating the practical importance and potential commercial impact of artificial intelligence technology.
1995	Manuel Blum	In recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its application to cryptography and program checking.
1996	Amir Pnueli	For seminal work introducing temporal logic into computing science and for outstanding contributions to program and systems verification.
1997	Douglas Engelbart	For an inspiring vision of the future of interactive computing and the invention of key technologies to help realize this vision.
1998	James Gray	For seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation.
1999	Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.	For landmark contributions to computer architecture, operating systems, and software engineering.
2000	Andrew Chi-Chih 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.
2001	Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard	For ideas fundamental to the emergence of object-oriented programming, through their design of the programming languages Simula I and Simula 67.
2002	Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard M. Adleman	For their ingenious contribution for making public-key cryptography useful in practice.
2003	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.
2004	Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn	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.
2005	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.