Biography
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941 – c. October 12, 2011) was an American computer scientist . [ 3 ] He created, together with long-time colleague Ken Thompson , the Unix operating system , C programming language , and B programming language . [ 3 ] Ritchie and Thompson were awarded the 1983 ACM Turing Award , the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1990, and the National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. Dennis Ritchie was born in Bronxville, New York . His father was Alistair E. Ritchie, a longtime Bell Labs scientist and co-author of The Design of Switching Circuits [ 4 ] on switching circuit theory . [ 5 ] As a child, Dennis moved with his family to Summit, New Jersey , where he graduated from Summit High School . [ 6 ] He graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics in 1963. [ 5 ] Fields: Computer science Education: Harvard University BS Award Citation: IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (1982) [ 1 ] Turing Award (1983) National Medal of Technology (1998) IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal (1990) Computer Pioneer Award (1994) Computer History Museum Fellow (1997) [ 2 ] 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)