Biography
Alan Jay Perlis (April 1, 1922 – February 7, 1990) was an American computer scientist and professor at Purdue University , Carnegie Mellon University and Yale University . He is best known for his pioneering work in programming languages and in 1966 he became the first recipient of the ACM Turing Award . [ 1 ] Perlis was born to a Jewish family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania . He graduated from Taylor Allderdice High School in 1939. [ 2 ] In 1943, he received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (later renamed Carnegie Mellon University ). During World War II , he served in the U.S. Army , where he became interested in mathematics. He then earned both a master's degree (1949) and a Ph.D. (1950) in mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His doctoral dissertation was titled "On Integral Equations , Their Solution by Iteration and Analytic Continuation ". Fields: Computer science Education: Carnegie Mellon University BS Massachusetts Institute of Technology MS PhD Award Citation: Turing Award , 1966 Computer Pioneer Award , 1985
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)