Biography
Peter Naur (25 October 1928 – 3 January 2016) [ 1 ] was a Danish computer science pioneer and 2005 Turing Award winner. He is best remembered as a contributor, with John Backus , to the Backus–Naur form (BNF) notation used in describing the syntax for most programming languages . He also contributed to creating the language ALGOL 60 . Naur began his career as an astronomer for which he received his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree in 1957, but his encounter with computers led to a change of profession. From 1959 to 1969, he was employed at Regnecentralen , the Danish computing company, while at the same time giving lectures at the Niels Bohr Institute and the Technical University of Denmark . From 1969 to 1998, Naur was a professor of computer science at University of Copenhagen . He was a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi, [ 2 ] which specified , supports, and maintains the languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68 . [ 3 ] Between the years 1960 and 1993 he was a member of the editorial board for BIT Numerical Mathematics , a journal focused on numerical analysis . [ 4 ] Fields: Computer science, informatics Education: University of Copenhagen BS MS PhD Award Citation: Computer Pioneer Award (1986) Turing Award (2005)
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)