Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (Tony Hoare or C.A.R. Hoare, born January 11, 1934) is a British computer scientist, probably best known for the development of Quicksort, the world's most widely used sorting algorithm, in 1960. He also developed Hoare logic, and the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) used to specify the interactions of concurrent processes and the inspiration for the Occam programming language.

Biography

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Born in Colombo (Sri Lanka) to British parents, he received his Bachelor's degree in Classics from the University of Oxford (Merton College) in 1956. He remained an extra year at Oxford studying graduate-level statistics, and following his National Service in the Royal Navy (1956–1958), when he learned to speak Russian, he studied computer translation of human languages at Moscow State University in the Soviet Union in the school of Kolmogorov.

In 1960, following the U-2 crisis, he left the Soviet Union and began working at Elliott Brothers, Ltd, a small computer manufacturing firm, where he implemented ALGOL 60 and began developing algorithms in earnest. He became a Professor of Computing Science at the Queen's University of Belfast in 1968, and in 1977 moved back to Oxford as a Professor of Computing to lead the Programming Research Group in the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, following the death of Christopher Strachey. He is now an Emeritus Professor there, and is also a senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England.

Awards

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• He received the 1980 ACM Turing Award for "his fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages". The award was presented to him at the ACM Annual Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 27, 1980, by Walter Carlson, Chairman of the Awards committee. A transcript of Hoare's speech was published in Communications of the ACM.
• In 2000 he was knighted for services to education and computer science.

Books

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References

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External links

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• Microsoft home page — short biography
• Oxford University Computing Laboratory home page — Emeritus Professor of Computing

1934 births | Living people | Computer pioneers | Computer scientists | British academics | British computer scientists | Members of Oxford University Computing Laboratory | British academics | British scientists | Fellows of the British Computer Society | Fellows of the Royal Society | Microsoft employees | Turing Award laureates | Knights Bachelor | Former students of Merton College, Oxford | Fellows of Wolfson College, Oxford | Formal methods people | Academics of Queen's University of Belfast

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