Jim Gray (computer scientist)

Biography

James Nicholas Gray (1944 – declared dead in absentia 2012) was an American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1998 "for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation". [ 4 ] Gray was born in San Francisco , the second child of Ann Emma Sanbrailo, a teacher, and James Able Gray, who was in the U.S. Army ; the family moved to Rome , Italy , where Gray spent most of the first three years of his life; he learned to speak Italian before English. The family then moved to Virginia , spending about four years there, until Gray's parents divorced, after which he returned to San Francisco with his mother. His father, an amateur inventor, patented a design for a ribbon cartridge for typewriters that earned him a substantial royalty stream. [ 2 ] After being turned down for the Air Force Academy he entered the University of California, Berkeley as a freshman in 1961. To help pay for college, he worked as a co-op for General Dynamics , where he learned to use a Monroe calculator . Discouraged by his chemistry grades, he left Berkeley for six months, returning after an experience in industry he later described as "dreadful". [ 2 ] Gray earned his B.S. in engineering mathematics (Math and Statistics) in 1966. [ 5 ] Education: University of California, Berkeley BS MS PhD New York University Award Citation: Turing Award (1998) [ 3 ] IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award (1998)

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)