Cocke, John

John Cocke, (born May 30, 1925, Charlotte, N.C., U.S.—died July 16, 2002, Valhalla, N.Y.), American mathematician and computer scientist and winner of the 1984 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for “significant contributions in the design and theory of compilers, the architecture of large systems and the development of reduced instruction set computers (RISC); for discovering and systematizing many fundamental transformations now used in optimizing compilers including reduction of operator strength, elimination of common subexpressions, register allocation, constant propagation, and dead code elimination.”

Cocke earned a bachelor’s degree (1946) in mechanical engineering and a doctorate (1953) in mathematics from Duke University. His whole professional career was as an industrial researcher for IBM (1956–92). Cocke was named a fellow of IBM (1974) and awarded an IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award (1989), a U.S. National Medal of Technology (1991), and a U.S. National Medal of Science (1994). He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (1979), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1986), and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1993).