Biography
John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist . He led the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN , the first widely used high-level programming language , and was the inventor of the Backus–Naur form (BNF), a widely used notation to define syntaxes of formal languages . He also contributed to the design of ALGOL , and later researched the function-level programming paradigm, presenting his findings in his influential 1977 Turing Award lecture "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?" [ 1 ] The IEEE awarded Backus the W. W. McDowell Award in 1967 for the development of FORTRAN. [ 2 ] He received the National Medal of Science in 1975 [ 3 ] and the 1977 ACM Turing Award "for profound, influential, and lasting contributions to the design of practical high-level programming systems, notably through his work on FORTRAN, and for publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages". [ 4 ] John Backus retired in 1991. He died at his home in Ashland, Oregon on March 17, 2007. [ 5 ] Fields: Computer science Education: University of Virginia University of Pittsburgh Haverford College Columbia University BS MS Award Citation: National Medal of Science (1975) Turing Award (1977) Charles Stark Draper Prize (1993)
About the Turing Award
The ACM A.M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science and is colloquially known as the "Nobel Prize of Computing."
Quick Facts
- Award: ACM A.M. Turing Award
- Added: 2026-02-07
- Source: Wikipedia
- Prize: $1,000,000 (USD)
- Presented by: ACM
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Notable Winners
- Donald Knuth (1974)
- Tim Berners-Lee (2016)
- Geoffrey Hinton (2018)
- Yoshua Bengio (2018)
- Yann LeCun (2018)