Biography
Barbara Liskov (born November 7, 1939, as Barbara Jane Huberman ) is an American computer scientist who has made pioneering contributions to programming languages and distributed computing . Her notable work includes the introduction of abstract data types and the accompanying principle of data abstraction , along with the Liskov substitution principle , which applies these ideas to object-oriented programming , subtyping , and inheritance . Her work was recognized with the 2008 Turing Award , the highest distinction in computer science. Liskov is one of the earliest women to have been granted a doctorate in computer science in the United States, and the second woman to receive the Turing award. She is currently an Institute Professor and Ford Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . [ 2 ] [ 3 ] Liskov was born November 7, 1939, in Los Angeles, California, [ 4 ] the eldest of Jane (née Dickhoff) and Moses Huberman's four children. [ 5 ] She earned her bachelor's degree in mathematics with a minor in physics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. At Berkeley, she had only one other female classmate in her major. [ 6 ] She applied to graduate mathematics programs at Berkeley and Princeton . At the time Princeton was not accepting female students in mathematics. [ 7 ] She was accepted at Berkeley but instead moved to Boston and began working at Mitre Corporation , where she became interested in computers and programming. She worked at Mitre for one year before taking a programming job at Harvard working on language translation. [ 7 ] Fields: Computer science Education: University of California, Berkeley BA Stanford University MS PhD Award Citation: IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2004) A. M. Turing Award (2008) National Inventors Hall of Fame (2012) Computer Pioneer Award (2018)
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)