Date of Birth
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03-December-1924
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Place of Birth
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Philadelphia
(Pennsylvania, United States of America, Area code 215, Area code 267, Area codes 215 and 267)
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Nationality
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United States of America
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Also know as
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John W. Backus, John Warner Backus
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Profession
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Mathematician, Computer Scientist
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John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming language and was the inventor of the Backus-Naur form, a widely used notation to define formal language syntax. He also did research in function-level programming and helped to popularize it.
The IEEE awarded Backus the W.W. McDowell Award in 1967 for the development of FORTRAN. He received the National Medal of Science in 1975, and the 1977 ACM Turing Award “for profound, influential, and lasting contributions to the design of practical high-level programming systems, notably through his work on FORTRAN, and for publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages.â€
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