Awards & Winners

John Backus

Date of Birth 03-December-1924
Place of Birth Philadelphia
(Pennsylvania, United States of America, Area code 215, Area code 267, Area codes 215 and 267)
Nationality United States of America
Also know as John W. Backus, John Warner Backus
Profession Mathematician, Computer Scientist
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.”

Awards by John Backus

Check all the awards nominated and won by John Backus.

1977


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 seminal publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages)

1975


National Medal of Science for Mathematics and Computer Science
(For his pioneering contributions to computer programming languages, especially development of the FORTRAN language which made the modern digital computer directly available to countless scientists and engineers.)