Tony Hoare

Sir Tony Hoare
Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare giving a conference at EPFL on 20 June 2011
Born	Charles Antony Richard Hoare (1934-01-11) 11 January 1934 (age 83) Colombo, British Ceylon
Other names	C. A. R. Hoare
Residence	Cambridge
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	Elliott Brothers Queen's University Belfast University of Oxford Moscow State University Microsoft Research
Alma mater	Merton College, Oxford (B.A., 1956) Moscow State University
Doctoral students	Andrew P. Black Stephen Brookes Jeremy Jacob Cliff Jones Peter Lauer David Naumann Bill Roscoe Augusto Sampaio William Stewart
Known for	Quicksort Hoare logic Null reference Communicating Sequential Processes Structured programming
Notable awards	ACM Turing Award (1980) Harry H. Goode Memorial Award (1981) Faraday Medal (1985) Computer Pioneer Award (1990) Kyoto Prize (2000) Computer History Museum Fellow (2006) IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2011) FRS FREng
Website www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/tony.hoare/

Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare FRS FREng (born 11 January 1934), commonly known as Tony Hoare or C. A. R. Hoare, is a British computer scientist. He developed the sorting algorithm quicksort in 1959/1960. He also developed Hoare logic for verifying program correctness, and the formal language communicating sequential processes (CSP) to specify the interactions of concurrent processes (including the dining philosophers problem) and the inspiration for the occam programming language.

Born in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to British parents, Tony Hoare's father was a colonial civil servant and his mother was the daughter of a tea planter. Hoare was educated in England at the Dragon School in Oxford and the King's School in Canterbury. He then studied Classics and Philosophy ("Greats") at Merton College, Oxford. On graduating in 1956 he did 18 months National Service in the Royal Navy, where he learned Russian. He returned to Oxford University in 1958 to study for a postgraduate certificate in Statistics, and it was here that he began computer programming, having been taught on the Ferranti Mercury by Leslie Fox. He then went to Moscow State University as a British Council exchange student, where he studied machine translation under Andrey Kolmogorov.