C. A. R. Hoare

Infobox_Scientist
name = Charles Antony Richard Hoare


image_width = 150px
birth_date = birth date and age|1934|1|11
birth_place = Colombo, Sri Lanka
field = Computer Scientist
work_institution = 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
prizes = ACM Turing AwardSir 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 in 1960 of Quicksort (or Hoaresort), one of the world's most widely used sorting algorithms. 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.

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.cite journal|author=C.A.R. Hoare|year = 1981| month = February|title = The emperor's old clothes|journal = Communications of the ACM|volume=24|issue=2|pages=5–83|doi = 10.1145/358549.358561|id = ISSN|0001-0782|url=http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=358561|format=PDF] 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.

The famous quote, "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil", by Donald Knuth [Knuth, Donald: [http://pplab.snu.ac.kr/courses/adv_pl05/papers/p261-knuth.pdf Structured Programming with Goto Statements] . "Computing Surveys" 6:4 (1974), 261–301. ] , has also been attributed to him (by Knuth himself). ["The Errors of Tex", in "Software—Practice & Experience", Volume 19, Issue 7 (July 1989), pp. 607–685, reprinted in his book Literate Programming (p. 276)]

Awards

* He received the 1980 ACM Turing Award for "his fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages". The award was presented to him at the ACM Annual Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 27, 1980, by Walter Carlson, Chairman of the Awards committee. A transcript of Hoare's speech was published in "Communications of the ACM".
*Harry H. Goode Memorial Award in 1981
* In 1982 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society
* On December 18th, 1987, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Science by the Queen's University Belfast.
* In 2000 he was knighted for services to education and computer science.
* In 2000 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize for Information Science.
* In 2005 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering
* On Oct 13, 2006, the Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California inducted him as Fellow of the Museum "for development of the Quicksort algorithm and for lifelong contributions to the theory of programming languages".
* He received an Honorary Doctorate of Science from the Department of Informatics of the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) on September 24th, 2007, in Athens, Greece.

Books

*cite book
author = O.-J. Dahl, E. W. Dijkstra and C. A. R. Hoare
year = 1972
title = Structured Programming
publisher = Academic Press
id = ISBN 0-12-200550-3
*cite book
author = C. A. R. Hoare
year = 1985
title = Communicating Sequential Processes
publisher = Prentice Hall International Series in Computer Science
id = ISBN 0-13-153271-5 hardback or ISBN 0-13-153289-8 paperback
others = (available online at http://www.usingcsp.com/ in PDF format)
*cite book
author = C. A. R. Hoare and M. J. C. Gordon
year = 1992
title = Mechanised Reasoning and Hardware Design
publisher = Prentice Hall International Series in Computer Science
id = ISBN 0-13-572405-8
*cite book
author = C. A. R. Hoare and He Jifeng
year = 1998
title = Unifying Theories of Programming
publisher = Prentice Hall International Series in Computer Science
id = ISBN 0-13-458761-8

References

External links

* [http://research.microsoft.com/users/thoare/ Microsoft home page] — short biography
* [http://www.cbi.umn.edu/oh/display.phtml?id=343 Oral history interview with C. A. R. Hoare] at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
* [http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/people/tony.hoare.html Oxford University Computing Laboratory home page] — Emeritus Professor of Computing
* [http://www.kierberg.com/videos/advice-for-phd-students-from-tony-hoare Advice for Ph.D. students from Tony Hoare] — held at the International Summer School Marktoberdorf 2006
*
* [http://www.acm.org/classics/feb96/ The classic article on monitors] — The original article on monitors that was republished as a classic of the ACM

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=