Home > Alan Perlis

Alan J. Perlis ( April 1, 1922 - February 7, 1990) was a prominent U.S. computer scientist. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pa. He was the first recipient of the Turing Award, in 1966.

In 1943, he received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (known now as Carnegie Mellon University).During World War 2 he served in the US Army where he became interested in mathematics. At MIT, he earned both a master's degree in mathematicsMathematics is commonly defined as the study of patterns of structure, change, and space; more informally, one might say it is the study of "figures and numbers". In the formalist view, it is the investigation of axiomatically defined abstract structures in 19491949 is the common year starting on Saturday. see link for calendar) Events January-February January 4 RMS Caronia of the Cunard Line departs Southampton for New York on her maiden voyage January 4 February 22 Series of winter storms in Nebraska, Wyoming, and a PhD in mathematics in 1950Events January January 5 US Senator Estes Kefauver introduces a resolution calling for examination of organized crime in the USA January 6 The United Kingdom recognizes the People's Republic of China. The Republic of China severs diplomatic relations with.

According to the citation, the Turing Award was: For his influence in the area of advanced programming techniques and compilerA compiler is a computer program that translates a computer program written in one computer language (called the source language into an equivalent program written in another computer language (called the output or the target language . Introduction and h construction. This is a reference to the work he had done as a member of the team that developed the ALGOL programming language

He was the first head of the Computer Science Department of Carnegie-Mellon University.

In 1982Events January January 6 William Bonin is convicted of being the "freeway killer". January 8 AT&T agrees to divest itself of twenty-two subdivisions January 11 Mark Thatcher, son of the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, disappears in the Sahara du, he wrote an article for ACM's SIGPLAN journal, Epigrams In Programming, describing in one-sentence distillations many of the things he had learned about programming over his career. The epigrams have been widely quoted.