Awards & Winners

Turing Award

Turing Award

The ACM A.M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community". It is stipulated that "The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field". The Turing Award is recognized as the "highest distinction in Computer science" and "Nobel Prize of computing". The award is named after Alan Turing, mathematician and reader in mathematics at the University of Manchester. Turing is "frequently credited for being the Father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence". As of 2007, the award is accompanied by a prize of $250,000, with financial support provided by Intel and Google. The first recipient, in 1966, was Alan Perlis, of Carnegie Mellon University. Frances E. Allen of IBM, in 2006, was the first female recipient in the award's forty year history. The 2008 and 2012 awards also went to women, Barbara Liskov and Shafi Goldwasser, respectively.
Date Established : 1966

Check all the winners of Turing Award presented under Turing Award since 1966 .


Leslie Lamport

(For fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems, notably the invention of concepts such as causality and logical clocks, safety and liveness, replicated state machines, and sequential consistency.)

Silvio Micali, Shafi Goldwasser

(For transformative work that laid the complexity-theoretic foundations for the science of cryptography and in the process pioneered new methods for efficient verification of mathematical proofs in complexity theory.)

Judea Pearl

(For fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning)

Leslie Valiant

(For transformative contributions to the theory of computation, including the theory of probably approximately correct (PAC) learning, the complexity of enumeration and of algebraic computation, and the theory of parallel and distributed computing.)

Charles P. Thacker

(For his pioneering design and realization of the Xerox Alto, the first modern personal computer, and in addition for his contributions to the Ethernet and the Tablet PC.)

Barbara Liskov

(For contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing.)

E. Allen Emerson, Joseph Sifakis, Edmund M. Clarke

(For [their roles] in developing Model-Checking into a highly effective verification technology, widely adopted in the hardware and software industries)

Frances Allen

(For pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of optimizing compiler techniques that laid the foundation for modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel execution.)

Peter Naur

(For fundamental contributions to programming language design and the definition of ALGOL 60, to compiler design, and to the art and practice of computer programming.)

Vint Cerf, Robert E. Kahn

(For pioneering work on internetworking, including the design and implementation of the Internet's basic communications protocols, TCP/IP, and for inspired leadership in networking.)

Alan Kay

(For pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing.)

Leonard Adleman, Adi Shamir, Ronald Rivest

(For their ingenious contribution for making public-key cryptography useful in practice.)

Kristen Nygaard, Ole-Johan Dahl

(For ideas fundamental to the emergence of object-oriented programming, through their design of the programming languages Simula I and Simula 67.)

Andrew Yao

(In recognition of his fundamental contributions to the theory of computation, including the complexity-based theory of pseudorandom number generation, cryptography, and communication complexity.)

Fred Brooks

(For landmark contributions to computer architecture, operating systems, and software engineering.)

Jim Gray

(for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation)

Douglas Engelbart

(For an inspiring vision of the future of interactive computing and the invention of key technologies to help realize this vision.)

Amir Pnueli

(for seminal work introducing temporal logic into computing science and for outstanding contributions to program and systems verification.)

Manuel Blum

(In recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its application to cryptography and program checking.)

Edward Feigenbaum, Raj Reddy

(For pioneering the design and construction of large scale artificial intelligence systems, demonstrating the practical importance and potential commercial impact of artificial intelligence technology.)

Richard Stearns, Juris Hartmanis

(In recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory.)

Butler Lampson

(For contributions to the development of distributed, personal computing environments and the technology for their implementation: workstations, networks, operating systems, programming systems, displays, security and document publishing.)

Robin Milner

(For three distinct and complete achievements: 1) LCF, the mechanization of Scott's Logic of Computable Functions, probably the first theoretically based yet practical tool for machine assisted proof construction; 2) ML, the first language to include polymorphic type inference together with a type-safe exception-handling mechanism; 3) CCS, a general theory of concurrency. In addition, he formulated and strongly advanced full abstraction, the study of the relationship between operational and denotational semantics.)

Fernando J. Corbató

(for his pioneering work in organizing the concepts and leading the development of the general-purpose, large-scale, time-sharing and resource-sharing computer systems.)

William Kahan

(For his fundamental contributions to numerical analysis. One of the foremost experts on floating-point computations. Kahan has dedicated himself to making the world safe for numerical computations.)

Ivan Sutherland

(For his pioneering and visionary contributions to computer graphics, starting with Sketchpad, and continuing after)

John Cocke

(For significant contributions in the design and theory of compilers, the architecture of large systems and the development of reduced instruction set computers (RISC))

Robert Tarjan, John Hopcroft

(For fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures.)

Richard M. Karp

(For his continuing contributions to the theory of algorithms including the development of efficient algorithms for network flow and other combinatorial optimization problems, the identification of polynomial-time computability with the intuitive notion of algorithmic efficiency, and, most notably, contributions to the theory of NP-completeness)

Niklaus Wirth

(For developing a sequence of innovative computer languages, EULER, ALGOL-W, MODULA and PASCAL)

Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie

(For their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system)

Stephen Cook

(For his advancement of our understanding of the complexity of computation in a significant and profound way. His seminal paper, The Complexity of Theorem Proving Procedures, presented at the 1971 ACM SIGACT Symposium on the Theory of Computing, laid the foundations for the theory of NP-Completeness. The ensuing exploration of the boundaries and nature of NP-complete class of problems has been one of the most active and important research activities in computer science for the last decade.)

Edgar F. Codd

(For his fundamental and continuing contributions to the theory and practice of database management systems, esp. relational databases)

Tony Hoare

(For his fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages)

Kenneth E. Iverson

(For his pioneering effort in programming languages and mathematical notation resulting in what the computing field now knows as APL, for his contributions to the implementation of interactive systems, to educational uses of APL, and to programming language theory and practice)

Robert W. Floyd

(For having a clear influence on methodologies for the creation of efficient and reliable software, and for helping to found the following important subfields of computer science: the theory of parsing, the semantics of programming languages, automatic program verification, automatic program synthesis, and analysis of algorithms)

John Backus

(For profound, influential, and lasting contributions to the design of practical high-level programming systems, notably through his work on FORTRAN, and for seminal publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages)

Michael O. Rabin, Dana Scott

(For their joint paper Finite Automata and Their Decision Problem, which introduced the idea of nondeterministic machines, which has proved to be an enormously valuable concept. Their (Scott & Rabin) classic paper has been a continuous source of inspiration for subsequent work in this field)

Allen Newell, Herbert Simon

(for their basic contributions to artificial intelligence and the psychology of human cognition)

Donald Knuth

(For his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to The Art of Computer Programming through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title)

Charles Bachman

(For his outstanding contributions to database technology)

Edsger W. Dijkstra

(for fundamental contributions in the area of programming languages)

John McCarthy

(for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence)

James H. Wilkinson

(For his research in numerical analysis to facilitate the use of the high-speed digital computer, having received special recognition for his work in computations in linear algebra and backward error analysis)

Marvin Minsky

(for his work in artificial intelligence)

Richard Hamming

(For his work on numerical methods, automatic coding systems, and error-detecting and error-correcting codes)

Maurice Vincent Wilkes

(Builder and designer of the EDSAC, the first computer with an internally stored program.)

Alan Perlis

(For his influence in the area of advanced programming techniques and compiler construction)