Biography
John Leroy Hennessy (born 22 September, 1952) is an American computer scientist and chairman of Alphabet Inc. [ 8 ] Hennessy is one of the founders of MIPS Technologies and Atheros , serving as 10th president of Stanford University from 2000 to 2016. He was succeeded as president by Marc Tessier-Lavigne . [ 9 ] Marc Andreessen called him "the godfather of Silicon Valley ." [ 10 ] Along with David Patterson , Hennessy was a recipient of the 2017 Turing Award for their work in developing the reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture, which is now used in 99% of new computer chips. [ 11 ] [ 12 ] [ 13 ] [ 14 ] [ 15 ] [ 16 ] [ 17 ] Hennessy was raised in Huntington, New York , as one of six children. [ 10 ] His father was an aerospace engineer, and his mother was a teacher before raising her children. [ 10 ] He is of Irish-Catholic descent, with some of his ancestors arriving in America during the potato famine in the 19th century. [ 18 ] Fields: Computer architecture, [ Education: Villanova University BS Stony Brook University MS PhD Award Citation: .mw-parser-output .plainlist ol,.mw-parser-output .plainlist ul{line-height:inherit;list-style:none;margin:0;padding:0}.mw-parser-output .plainlist ol li,.mw-parser-output .plainlist ul li{margin-bottom:0} Charles Stark Draper Prize (2022) Turing Award (2017) BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2020) Clark Kerr Award (2020) IEEE Medal of Honor (2012) Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2002) [ 3 ] Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences ACM Fellow (1997) [ 4 ] Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2017)
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)