Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology

Appendix III 5431977 John Backus: “For profound, influential, and lastingcontributions to the design of practical high-level programmingsystems, notably through his work on FORTRAN, and for seminalpublication of formal procedures for the specification of programminglanguages.”1978 Robert W. Floyd: “For having a clear influence on methodologiesfor the creation of efficient and reliable software,and for helping to found the following important subfields ofcomputer science: the theory of parsing, the semantics of programminglanguages, automatic program verification, automaticprogram synthesis, and analysis of algorithms.”1979 Kenneth E. Iverson: “For his pioneering effort in programminglanguages and mathematical notation resulting in whatthe computing field now knows as APL, for his contributions tothe implementation of interactive systems, to educational uses ofAPL, and to programming language theory and practice.”1980 C. Anthony R. Hoare: “For his fundamental contributionsto the definition and design of programming languages.”1981 Edgar F. Codd: “For his fundamental and continuingcontributions to the theory and practice of database managementsystems. He originated the relational approach to databasemanagement in a series of research papers published commencingin 1970. His paper ‘A Relational Model of Data forLarge Shared Data Banks’ was a seminal paper, in a continuingand carefully developed series of papers. Dr. Codd built uponthis space and in doing so has provided the impetus for widespreadresearch into numerous related areas, including databaselanguages, query subsystems, database semantics, locking andrecovery, and inferential subsystems.”1982 Stephen A. Cook: “For his advancement of our understandingof the complexity of computation in a significant andprofound way. His seminal paper, ‘The Complexity of TheoremProving Procedures,’ presented at the 1971 ACM SIGACT Symposiumon the Theory of Computing, laid the foundations forthe theory of NP-Completeness. The ensuing exploration of theboundaries and nature of NP-complete class of problems hasbeen one of the most active and important research activities incomputer science for the last decade.”1983 Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie: “For their developmentof generic operating systems theory and specifically forthe implementation of the UNIX operating system.”1984 Niklaus Wirth: “For developing a sequence of innovativecomputer languages, EULER, ALGOL-W, MODULA andPASCAL. PASCAL has become pedagogically significant and hasprovided a foundation for future computer language, systems,and architectural research.”1985 Richard M. Karp: “For his continuing contributions tothe theory of algorithms including the development of efficientalgorithms for network flow and other combinatorial optimizationproblems, the identification of polynomial-time computabilitywith the intuitive notion of algorithmic efficiency, and,most notably, contributions to the theory of NP-completeness.Karp introduced the now standard methodology for provingproblems to be NP-complete which has led to the identificationof many theoretical and practical problems as being computationallydifficult.”1986 John Hopcroft and Robert Tarjan: “For fundamentalachievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and datastructures.”1987 John Cocke: “For significant contributions in the designand theory of compilers, the architecture of large systems andthe development of reduced instruction set computers (RISC);for discovering and systematizing many fundamental transformationsnow used in optimizing compilers including reductionof operator strength, elimination of common subexpressions,register allocation, constant propagation, and dead code elimination.”1988 Ivan Sutherland: “For his pioneering and visionary contributionsto computer graphics, starting with Sketchpad, andcontinuing after. Sketchpad, though written twenty-five yearsago, introduced many techniques still important today. Theseinclude a display file for screen refresh, a recursively traversedhierarchical structure for modeling graphical objects, recursivemethods for geometric transformations, and an object orientedprogramming style. Later innovations include a ‘Lorgnette’ forviewing stereo or colored images, and elegant algorithms forregistering digitized views, clipping polygons, and representingsurfaces with hidden lines.”1989 William (Velvel) Kahan: “For his fundamental contributionsto numerical analysis. One of the foremost experts onfloating-point computations. Kahan has dedicated himself to‘making the world safe for numerical computations.’ ”1990 Fernando J. Corbato: “For his pioneering work organizingthe concepts and leading the development of the general-purpose,large-scale, time-sharing and resource-sharingcomputer systems, CTSS and Multics.”1991 Robin Milner: “For three distinct and complete achievements:1) LCF, the mechanization of Scott’s Logic of ComputableFunctions, probably the first theoretically based yet practicaltool for machine assisted proof construction; 2) ML, the firstlanguage to include polymorphic type inference together witha type-safe exception-handling mechanism; 3) CCS, a generaltheory of concurrency. In addition, he formulated and stronglyadvanced full abstraction, the study of the relationship betweenoperational and denotational semantics.”1992 Butler W. Lampson: “For contributions to the developmentof distributed, personal computing environments and thetechnology for their implementation: workstations, networks,operating systems, programming systems, displays, security anddocument publishing.”