John Backus
| John Backus | |
|---|---|
Dec.1989
|
|
| Born |
December 3, 1924 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Died | March 17, 2007 (aged 82) Ashland, Oregon |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | IBM |
| Alma mater |
University of Virginia Columbia University (M.S., 1950) |
| Known for |
Speedcoding FORTRAN ALGOL Backus–Naur form Function-level programming |
| Notable awards |
National Medal of Science (1975) ACM Turing Award (1977) Charles Stark Draper Prize (1993) |
John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of the Backus–Naur form (BNF), a widely used notation to define formal language syntax. He later did research into the function-level programming paradigm, presenting his findings in his influential 1977 Turing Award lecture "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?"
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”.
He retired in 1991 and died at his home in Ashland, Oregon on March 17, 2007.
Backus was born in Philadelphia and grew up in nearby Wilmington, Delaware. He studied at The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and was apparently not a diligent student. After entering the University of Virginia to study chemistry, he quit and was conscripted into the U.S. Army. He began medical training at Haverford College and, during an internship at a hospital, he was diagnosed with a cranial bone tumor, which was successfully removed; a plate was installed in his head, and he ended medical training after nine months and a subsequent operation to replace the plate with one of his own design.
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