Tony Hoare

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Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (Tony Hoare) has conducted research in computer science for over sixty years. He began and finished his career working in industry, while spending the middle half in academia.

He started his career in 1960 as a programmer for Elliott Brothers Ltd, a small British computer manufacturer. He led a successful project to develop one of the earliest compilers of the trail-blazing language ALGOL 60. Promoted then to Chief Engineer, he led a project to design and deliver an innovative operating system. This project failed, and he spent the next two years overseeing the development of software for small groups of customers. After this “recovery period,” he was appointed Chief Scientist in the company’s research division.

The academic half of his career was served as Professor at the Queen’s University Belfast (1968-1977), and then at Oxford University (1977-1999). At each university he founded the first undergraduate and graduate degree courses in computer science, along with many joint degrees with departments of the faculties of Mathematics and Engineering. He also founded a flourishing part-time MSc in Oxford in Software Engineering for students working in industry.

After retiring from Oxford, he joined Microsoft Research, first as a consultant (1997-1999), then as a senior principal researcher (1999-2015), and eventually as an honorary visitor (2015- 2021).

Tony is known for many significant research achievements: his sorting and selection algorithms, for example, Quicksort and Find, Hoare logic, and the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes. He also inspired and worked on theoretical aspects of The Verified Software Initiative, a long-term international collaboration with three cooperating strands: to develop theories of programming and a methodology of programming; to implement the theories by programming tools that assist programmers in applying the theories; and to test the results by realistic experiment at a scale above the usual academic reach. The project has successfully met these initial fifteen-year goals.

Tony has accepted many honors over his career. He describes his feelings on acceptance: “Each honor was unexpected; it was accepted with delight, firstly as a token of the respect accorded to me by fellow scientists whose achievements I deeply respected; and secondly as a token of the rising status of Computing Science among the other scientific disciplines.” Tony’s notable awards are the A. M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (opens in new tab) (1982), which recognized his fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages; The Harry Goode Memorial Award (1985), Faraday Medal (1985)The Kyoto Prize (2000) for advanced technology, which is awarded only once every four years for all branches of technology; Sigplan Distinguised Achievement Award (2011) and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2011), the highest honor offered internationally for engineering.

Other distinctions include his knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to education and computer science in 2000. Other honors include Fellowship in the British Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering, foreign membership of the US Academies of Science and of Engineering, and other academies in Italy and Bavaria. He has won two Queen’s Awards for Technological Achievement, given for collaboration between his academic Department and Industry (IBM and Inmos). He has also received fellowships of professional associations (BCS and ACM), several international prizes , 15 honorary doctorates, 3 honorary fellowships, many keynote lectureships at prestigious conferences, industrial consultancies, four Festschrift dedications, and book editorships for Academic Press in the APIC Studies in Data Processing, and for the ‘red and white’ series, Prentice Hall International Studies in Computer Science (over 100 books for both studies).

Distinctions granted by industry are rarer than those given in academia. He says “I therefore take special delight in the title of Emeritus Researcher at Microsoft. It is a recognition that research results achieved in the research divisions of large industrial companies are now widely applied in all sectors of the world economy which benefit from use of computers”. He hopes that his current research will be a contribution to the next phase in the Verified Software Initiative, currently under consideration by the Newton Institute at Cambridge, a short walk from where he now lives.