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Professor Sir C A R (Tony) Hoare, MA, FRS, Mem. Ac. Eur., Dist. FBCS
Sir Tony Hoare is an influential British computer scientist who is credited with developing various wide-ranging algorithms and specification techniques used throughout the computing industry. Born in
Sri Lanka in 1934, Hoare's interest in computing was awakened in the early 1950s while studying philosophy, together with Latin and Greek, at Oxford University, where he became fascinated by the
power of mathematical logic as an explanation of the apparent certainty of mathematical truth.
During his National Service he studied Russian in the Royal Navy, then took a qualification in statistics and a course in programming. In 1959, as a graduate student at Moscow State University, he
studied the machine translation of languages, and to assist in efficient look-up of words in a dictionary, he developed the ubiquitous QuickSort algorithm.
Returning to the UK in the 1960s, Hoare worked as a programmer for a small scientific computer manufacturer, before becoming Professor of Computing Science at Queen's University Belfast in 1968.
In 1977, he returned to Oxford to take up the post of Professor of Computing, where he led the Programming Research Group. Sir Tony is now Emeritus Professor at Oxford University, and works as a
Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.
Throughout the late 1960s Sir Tony developed what went on to be termed Hoare Logic, a specification technique which allows programmers to convert programs into into provable, logical formulae
which can be verified for correctness. He later turned his attention to the emerging field of parallel programming with the development of his language of Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) for
use in specifying the interactions of concurrent processes, which formed the inspiration for the Occam programming language. His current focus is on his "Grand Challenge" for Computer Science of
devising a Verifying Compiler which will use automated mathematical and logical reasoning to check the correctness of the programs that it compiles.
In 1980, Hoare received the ACM Turing Award for his "fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages", and in 2000 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize for his
"pioneering and fundamental contributions to software science". These two awards represent the top international accolades available to a Computer Scientist. Also in 2000 he was knighted by Her
Majesty the Queen for services to education and Computer Science.
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