Biography
Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943) is an American pioneer of computer science . Thompson worked at Bell Labs for most of his career where he designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language , the direct predecessor to the C language , and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating system. Other notable contributions included his work on regular expressions and early computer text editors QED and ed , the definition of the UTF-8 encoding, and his work on computer chess that included the creation of endgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle . Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google , where he co-developed the Go language . In 1983, he won the Turing Award with his long-term colleague Dennis Ritchie . [ 3 ] He is considered one of the greatest computer programmers of all time. [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ] Thompson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana . When asked how he learned to program, Thompson stated, "I was always fascinated with logic and even in grade school I'd work on arithmetic problems in binary, stuff like that. Just because I was fascinated." [ 7 ] Fields: Computer science Education: University of California, Berkeley BS MS Award Citation: IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (1982) [ 1 ] Turing Award (1983) Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1985) [ 2 ] IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal (1990) Computer Pioneer Award (1994) National Medal of Technology (1998) Tsutomu Kanai Award (1999) Harold Pender Award (2003) Japan Prize (2011)
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)