Professor Charles Antony Richard Hoare

A British computer scientist best known for the development (in 1960, at age 26) of Quicksort, one of the world's most widely used sorting algorithms, he also developed Hoare logic for verifying program correctness, and the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) to specify the interactions of concurrent processes (including the dining philosophers problem) and the inspiration for the occam programming language. Born in Colombo, Ceylon (now 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 following his National Service in the Royal Navy (1956?1958). While he studied Russian, he also studied computer translation of human languages at the Moscow State University in the Soviet Union in the school of Kolmogorov. In 1960, 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 major algorithms. He became the Professor of Computing Science at the Queen's University of Belfast in 1968, and in 1977 returned to Oxford as the 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 principal researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England. Hoare's most significant work has been in the following areas: his sorting algorithm (Quicksort), Hoare logic, the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) used to specify the interactions between concurrent processes, structuring computer operating systems using the monitor concept, and the axiomatic specification of programming languages. In 1982 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Following are some of the awards he has received: ACM Turing Award for "fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages"; Harry H. Goode Memorial Award (1981); Honorary Doctorate of Science by the Queen's University Belfast (1987); Knighted for services to education and computer science (2000); Kyoto Prize for Information science (2000); Fellow of the Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California "for development of the Quicksort algorithm and for lifelong contributions to the theory of programming languages" (2006); Honorary Doctorate of Science from the Department of Informatics of the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) (2007); and IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2011). He is also an author/co-author of the following books: Structured Programming with O.-J. Dahl, E. W. Dijkstra (1972); Communicating Sequential Processes (1985); Mechanised Reasoning and Hardware Design (1992).with M. J. C. Gordon; and Unifying Theories of Programming (1998) with He Jifeng.