CAR Hoare

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Charles Antony Richard Hoare

Born 11 January 1934 (1934-01-11) (age 74)
Colombo, Sri Lanka
Fields Computer Scientist
Institutions Elliott Brothers
Queen's University of Belfast
Oxford University
Moscow State University
Microsoft Research
Alma mater Oxford University
Moscow State University
Doctoral students Stephen Brookes
Cliff Jones
David Naumann
Bill Roscoe
William Stewart
Known for Quicksort
Hoare logic
CSP
Notable awards ACM Turing Award

Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (Tony Hoare or C.A.R. Hoare, born 11 January 1934) is a British computer scientist, probably best known for the development in 1960 of Quicksort (or Hoaresort), 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) used to specify the interactions of concurrent processes (including the Dining philosophers problem) and the inspiration for the Occam programming language.

Contents

Biography

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, 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, 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.1 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.

The famous quote, "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil", by Donald Knuth,2 has also been attributed to him (by Knuth himself),3 although Hoare disclaims having coined the phrase.4

Awards

Books

References

  1. ^ a b C.A.R. Hoare (February 1981). "The emperor's old clothes" (PDF). Communications of the ACM 24 (2): 5–83. doi:10.1145/358549.358561. ISSN 0001-0782. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=358561. 
  2. ^ Knuth, Donald: Structured Programming with Goto Statements. Computing Surveys 6:4 (1974), 261–301.
  3. ^ The Errors of Tex, in Software—Practice & Experience, Volume 19, Issue 7 (July 1989), pp. 607–685, reprinted in his book Literate Programming (p. 276)
  4. ^ Tony Hoare, a 2004 email

External links


Persondata
NAME Hoare, Charles Antony Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION Computer Science
DATE OF BIRTH 11 January 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH Colombo, Sri Lanka
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH

Wikipedia content modification information:

  • This page was last modified on 23 December 2008, at 22:25.

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