Tony Hoare

Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (Template:IPAc-en; born 11 January 1934), also known as C. A. R. Hoare, is a British computer scientist who has made foundational contributions to programming languages, algorithms, operating systems, formal verification, and concurrent computing.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> His work earned him the Turing Award, usually regarded as the highest distinction in computer science, in 1980.

Hoare developed the sorting algorithm quicksort in 1959–1960.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> He developed Hoare logic, an axiomatic basis for verifying program correctness.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> In the semantics of concurrency, he introduced the formal language communicating sequential processes (CSP) to specify the interactions of concurrent processes, and along with Edsger Dijkstra, formulated the dining philosophers problem.<ref name="ACM">Template:ACM Portal</ref><ref name="dblp">Template:DBLP</ref><ref name="microsoft">Template:AcademicSearch</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref name="monitors">Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite report</ref> Since 1977, he has held positions at the University of Oxford and Microsoft Research in Cambridge.

Education and early life

Tony Hoare was born in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to British parents; his father was a colonial civil servant and his mother was the daughter of a tea planter. Hoare was educated in England at the Dragon School in Oxford and the King's School in Canterbury.<ref name="bl">Template:Cite web</ref> He then studied Classics and Philosophy ("Greats") at Merton College, Oxford.<ref name="MCreg">Template:Cite book</ref> On graduating in 1956 he did 18 months National Service in the Royal Navy,<ref name=MCreg /> where he learned Russian.<ref name="Hoare_autobio">Template:Cite journal</ref> He returned to the University of Oxford in 1958 to study for a postgraduate certificate in statistics,<ref name=MCreg /> and it was here that he began computer programming, having been taught Autocode on the Ferranti Mercury by Leslie Fox.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He then went to Moscow State University as a British Council exchange student,<ref name=MCreg /> where he studied machine translation under Andrey Kolmogorov.<ref name="Hoare_autobio"/>

Research and career

In 1960, Hoare left the Soviet Union and began working at Elliott Brothers Ltd,<ref name=MCreg /> a small computer manufacturing firm located in London. There, he implemented the language ALGOL 60 and began developing major algorithms.<ref name="Hoare81">Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

He was involved with developing international standards in programming and informatics, as a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> which specified, maintains, and supports the languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

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 (now Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford), following the death of Christopher Strachey. He became the first Christopher Strachey Professor of Computing on its establishment in 1988 until his retirement at Oxford in 2000.<ref name="cs-strachey-prof">Template:Cite web</ref> He is now an Emeritus Professor there, and is also a principal researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England.<ref>Microsoft home page – short biography</ref><ref>Oral history interview with C. A. R. Hoare at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.</ref><ref>Template:Doi-inline – The original article on monitors</ref>

Hoare's most significant work has been in the following areas: his sorting and selection algorithm (Quicksort and Quickselect), Hoare logic, the formal language communicating sequential processes (CSP) used to specify the interactions between concurrent processes (and implemented in various programming languages such as occam), structuring computer operating systems using the monitor concept, and the axiomatic specification of programming languages.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Speaking at a software conference in 2009, Tony Hoare hyperbolically apologized for inventing the null reference:<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Template:Blockquote

For many years under his leadership, Hoare's Oxford department worked on formal specification languages such as CSP and Z. These did not achieve the expected take-up by industry, and in 1995 Hoare was led to reflect upon the original assumptions:<ref>Template:Cite conference</ref> Template:Blockquote A commemorative article was written in tribute to Hoare for his 90th birthday.<ref> Template:Cite newsletter</ref>

Awards and honours

• ACM Programming Systems and Languages Paper Award (1973)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> for the paper "Proof of correctness of data representations"<ref name="HoareActa1972">Template:Cite journal</ref>
• Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society (1978)
• Turing Award for "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 27 October 1980, by Walter Carlson, chairman of the Awards committee. A transcript of Hoare's speech<ref name="ACM_Turing_Award_lecture">Template:Cite web</ref> was published in Communications of the ACM.<ref name="Hoare81" />
• Harry H. Goode Memorial Award (1981)
• Fellow of the Royal Society (1982)<ref name=frs>Template:Cite web</ref>
• Honorary Doctorate of Science by the Queen's University Belfast (1987)
• Honorary Doctorate of Science, from the University of Bath (1993)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• Honorary Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford (1998)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• Knighted for services to education and computer science (2000)
• Kyoto Prize for Information science (2000)
• Fellow<ref name="List of Fellows">Template:Cite web</ref> of the Royal Academy of Engineering<ref name="List of Fellows"/> (2005)
• Member of the National Academy of Engineering (2006) for fundamental contributions to computer science in the areas of algorithms, operating systems, and programming languages.
• Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California Fellow of the Museum "for development of the Quicksort algorithm and for lifelong contributions to the theory of programming languages" (2006)<ref>Template:Cite webTemplate:Cite web</ref>
• Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University (2007)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• Honorary Doctorate of Science from the Department of Informatics of the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) (2007)
• Friedrich L. Bauer-Prize, Technical University of Munich (2007)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award (2011)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2011)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• Honorary Doctorate, University of Warsaw (2012)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• Honorary Doctorate, Complutense University of Madrid (2013)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• Royal Medal of the Royal Society (2023)<ref>Royal Medal 2023</ref>

Personal life

In 1962, Hoare married Jill Pym, a member of his research team.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Books

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• C. A. R. Hoare (1985). Communicating Sequential Processes. Prentice Hall International Series in Computer Science. Template:ISBN (hardback) or Template:ISBN (paperback). (Available online at http://www.usingcsp.com/ in PDF format.)
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External links

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