Biography
William "Velvel" Morton Kahan (born June 5, 1933) is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist , who is a professor emeritus at University of California, Berkeley . He received the Turing Award in 1989 for "his fundamental contributions to numerical analysis ." [ 2 ] Born to a Canadian Jewish family, [ 2 ] he attended the University of Toronto , where he received his bachelor's degree in 1954, his master's degree in 1956, and his Ph.D. in 1958, all in the field of mathematics. Kahan is now emeritus professor of mathematics and of electrical engineering and computer sciences (EECS) at the University of California, Berkeley . Kahan was the primary architect behind the IEEE 754-1985 standard for floating-point computation (and its radix-independent follow-on, IEEE 854 ). He has been called "The Father of Floating Point", since he was instrumental in creating the original IEEE 754 specification. [ 2 ] Kahan continued his contributions to the IEEE 754 revision that led to the current IEEE 754 standard . Fields: Mathematics, Computer science Education: University of Toronto BS MS PhD Award Citation: Turing Award (1989) IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award [ 1 ] (2000) National Academy of Engineering ACM Fellow
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)