Biography
Sir Maurice Vincent Wilkes (26 June 1913 – 29 November 2010 [ 11 ] ) was an English computer scientist who designed and helped build the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), one of the earliest stored-program computers , and who invented microprogramming , a method for using stored-program logic to operate the control unit of a central processing unit 's circuits. In 1967 he won the ACM Turing Award . At the time of his death, Wilkes was an Emeritus Professor at the University of Cambridge . Wilkes was born in Dudley , Worcestershire , England [ 12 ] the only child of Ellen (Helen), née Malone (1885–1968) and Vincent Joseph Wilkes (1887–1971), an accounts clerk at the estate of the Earl of Dudley . [ 13 ] He grew up in Stourbridge , West Midlands, and was educated at King Edward VI College, Stourbridge . During his school years he was introduced to amateur radio by his chemistry teacher. [ 14 ] He studied the Mathematical Tripos at St John's College, Cambridge , from 1931 to 1934, and in 1936 completed his PhD in physics on the subject of radio propagation of very long radio waves in the ionosphere . [ 15 ] He was appointed to a junior faculty position of the University of Cambridge , through which he was involved in the establishment of a computing laboratory. He was called up for military service during World War II and worked on radar at the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) and in operational research . [ 16 ] Fields: Computer science Education: St John's College, Cambridge BA MA PhD Award Citation: Turing Award (1967) [ 1 ] Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society (1973) Faraday Medal (1981) Harold Pender Award (1982) Mountbatten Medal (1997)
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)