Turing Award

Winners, Prize Money, & Facts

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Oct 6, 2023 - 16:41

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Turing Award, in full A.M. Turing Award, annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a professional computing society founded in 1947, to one or more individuals “selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community.” The Turing Award is often referred to as the computer science equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

The Turing Award is named for Alan Mathison Turing, an English pioneer in computers and artificial intelligence. The first recipient of the award, in 1966, was Alan J. Perlis, an American computer scientist who wrote the compiler for the ALGOL computer programming language. The first woman to win the prize was Frances E. Allen, in 2006, for her work in compiler optimization, which contributed to the development of parallel execution in multiprocessing. The youngest recipient was Donald Knuth, who was 36 when he received the award in 1974 for his work on algorithms and computer programming. The oldest recipient was Alfred Vaino Aho, who was 79 when he received the award in 2020 for his work on algorithms and the theory of programming language implementation.

Intel Corporation began funding the Turing Award in 2002, and in 2007 Google Inc. joined in funding the award. The prize money was raised to $250,000 that year and then to $1,000,000 in 2014.

A list of Turing Award winners is provided in the table.

A.M. Turing Award winners
year	name	nationality	area of achievement
1966	Perlis, Alan J.	American	compiler for the ALGOL programming language
1967	Wilkes, Maurice V.	British	EDSAC, the first stored-program computer
1968	Hamming, Richard W.	American	Hamming codes for error detection and error correction
1969	Minsky, Marvin L.	American	artificial intelligence
1970	Wilkinson, James H.	British	numerical analysis on supercomputers
1971	McCarthy, John	American	artificial intelligence
1972	Dijkstra, Edsger W.	Dutch	programming languages, including ALGOL
1973	Bachman, Charles W.	American	database technology
1974	Knuth, Donald E.	American	computer algorithms and programming languages
1975	Newell, Allen	American	artificial intelligence
1975	Simon, Herbert A.	American	artificial intelligence
1976	Rabin, Michael O.	German	nondeterministic machines
1976	Scott, Dana S.	American	nondeterministic machines
1977	Backus, John	American	programming languages, including FORTRAN
1978	Floyd, Robert W.	American	programming languages, including automatic program verification
1979	Iverson, Kenneth E.	Canadian	programming languages, including APL
1980	Hoare, C. Antony R.	British	programming languages
1981	Codd, Edgar F.	British	programming languages
1982	Cook, Stephen A.	American	theory of NP-complete problems
1983	Ritchie, Dennis M.	American	operating systems, including UNIX
1983	Thompson, Kenneth L.	American	operating systems, including UNIX
1984	Wirth, Niklaus E.	Swiss	programming languages, including PASCAL
1985	Karp, Richard M.	American	theory of algorithms and study of NP-complete problems
1986	Hopcroft, John E.	American	algorithms and data structures
1986	Tarjan, Robert E.	American	algorithms and data structures
1987	Cocke, John	American	compilers and microprocessors
1988	Sutherland, Ivan	American	computer graphics
1989	Kahan, William	Canadian	numerical analysis
1990	Corbato, Fernando J.	American	time-sharing systems, including CTSS and Multics
1991	Milner, A.J. Robin	British	machine-assisted proof construction
1992	Lampson, Butler W.	American	distributed computing
1993	Hartmanis, Juris	Latvian-American	computational complexity theory
1993	Stearns, Richard E.	American	computational complexity theory
1994	Feigenbaum, Edward	American	artificial intelligence
1994	Reddy, Raj	Indian	artificial intelligence
1995	Blum, Manuel	American	computational complexity theory
1996	Pnueli, Amir	Israeli	temporal logic in computing
1997	Engelbart, Douglas	American	computer mouse and multiple windows
1998	Gray, Jim	American	databases and transaction processing
1999	Brooks, Frederick P.	American	computer architecture, operating systems, and software engineering
2000	Yao, Andrew Chi-Chih	Chinese	theory of computations
2001	Dahl, Ole-Johan	Norwegian	object-oriented programming languages
2001	Nygaard, Kristen	Norwegian	object-oriented programming languages
2002	Adleman, Leonard M.	American	public-key cryptography
2002	Rivest, Ronald L.	American	public-key cryptography
2002	Shamir, Adi	Israeli	public-key cryptography
2003	Kay, Alan	American	object-oriented programming languages, including Smalltalk
2004	Cerf, Vinton	American	Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)
2004	Kahn, Robert E.	American	Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)
2005	Naur, Peter	Danish	programming languages, including ALGOL 60
2006	Allen, Frances E.	American	compiler optimization and automatic parallel execution
2007	Clarke, Edmund M.	American	model checking software
2007	Emerson, E. Allen	American	model checking software
2007	Sifakis, Joseph	French	model checking software
2008	Liskov, Barbara J.H.	American	programming languages and system design
2009	Thacker, Charles P.	American	Alto, the first personal computer
2010	Valiant, Leslie	American	computational learning theory
2011	Pearl, Judea	Israeli- American	artificial intelligence
2012	Goldwasser, Shafi	Israeli- American	cryptography
2012	Micali, Silvio	American	computational complexity
2013	Lamport, Leslie	American	analysis of algorithms and proof construction
2014	Stonebraker, Michael	American	databases
2015	Diffie, Whitfield	American	cryptography
2015	Hellman, Martin	American	cryptography
2016	Berners-Lee, Tim	British	HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and the World Wide Web
2017	Hennessy, John L.	American	computer architecture
2017	Patterson, David	American	computer architecture
2018	Bengio, Yoshua	Canadian	artificial intelligence
2018	Hinton, Geoffrey	Canadian	artificial intelligence
2018	LeCun, Yann	American	artificial intelligence
2019	Catmull, Edwin E.	American	3D computer graphics
2019	Hanrahan, Patrick M.	American	3D computer graphics
2020	Aho, Alfred Vaino	American	algorithms and theory underlying programming language implementation
2020	Ullman, Jeffrey David	American	algorithms and theory underlying programming language implementation
2021	Dongarra, Jack	American	algorithms and software