Turing Award


The Turing Award is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a professional computing society founded in 1947, to one or more individuals "selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community." The Turing Award is often referred to as the computer science equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

Intel Corporation began funding the Turing Award in 2002, and in 2007 Google joined in funding the award. The prize money was raised to $250,000 that year and then to $1,000,000 in 2014.

A list of the winners is below.

1966 Alan Perlis
For his influence in the area of advanced computer programming techniques and compiler construction
1967 Maurice Wilkes
Wilkes is best known as the builder and designer of the EDSAC, the second computer with an internally stored program. Built in 1949, the EDSAC used a mercury delay line memory. He is also known as the author, with David Wheeler and Stanley Gill, of a volume on "Preparation of Programs for Electronic Digital Computers" in 1951, in which program libraries were effectively introduced.
1968 Richard Hamming
For his work on numerical methods, automatic coding systems, and error-detecting and error-correcting codes
1969 Marvin Minsky
For his central role in creating, shaping, promoting, and advancing the field of artificial intelligence
1970 James H Wilkinson
For his research in numerical analysis to facilitate the use of the high-speed digital computer, having received special recognition for his work in computations in linear algebra and "backward" error analysis
1971 John McCarthy
McCarthy's lecture "The Present State of Research on Artificial Intelligence" is a topic that covers the area in which he has achieved considerable recognition for his work.
1972 Edsger W Dijkstra
Edsger Dijkstra was a principal contributor in the late 1950s to the development of the ALGOL, a high level programming language which has become a model of clarity and mathematical rigor. He is one of the principal proponents of the science and art of programming languages in general, and has greatly contributed to our understanding of their structure, representation, and implementation. His fifteen years of publications extend from theoretical articles on graph theory to basic manuals, expository texts, and philosophical contemplations in the field of programming languages.
1973 Charles Bachman
For his outstanding contributions to database technology
1974 Donald Knuth
For his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to "The Art of Computer Programming" through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title
1975 Allen Newell and Herbert A Simon
In joint scientific efforts extending over twenty years, initially in collaboration with J C Shaw at the RAND Corporation, and subsequently with numerous faculty and student colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, they have made basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing.
1976 Michael O Rabin and Dana Scott
For their joint paper "Finite Automata and Their Decision Problem", which introduced the idea of nondeterministic machines, a continuous source of inspiration for subsequent work in this field
1977 John Backus
For profound, influential, and lasting contributions to the design of practical high-level programming systems, notably through his work on FORTRAN, and for seminal publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages
1978 Robert W. Floyd
For having a clear influence on methodologies for the creation of efficient and reliable software, and for helping to found the following important subfields of computer science: the theory of parsing, the semantics of programming languages, automatic program verification, automatic program synthesis, and analysis of algorithms
1979 Kenneth E Iverson
For his pioneering effort in programming languages and mathematical notation resulting in what the computing field now knows as APL, for his contributions to the implementation of interactive systems, to educational uses of APL, and to programming language theory and practice
1980 Tony Hoare
For his fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages
1981 Edgar F. Codd
For his fundamental and continuing contributions to the theory and practice of database management systems, esp. relational databases
1982 Stephen Cook
For his advancement of our understanding of the complexity of computation in a significant and profound way
1983 Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie
For their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system
1984 Niklaus Wirth
For developing a sequence of innovative computer languages, EULER, ALGOL-W, Pascal, MODULA and Oberon
1985 Richard M Karp
For his continuing contributions to the theory of algorithms including the development of efficient algorithms for network flow and other combinatorial optimization problems, the identification of polynomial-time computability with the intuitive notion of algorithmic efficiency, and, most notably, contributions to the theory of NP-completeness
1986 John Hopcroft and Robert Tarjan
For fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures
1987 John Cocke
For significant contributions in the design and theory of compilers, the architecture of large systems and the development of reduced instruction set computers (RISC)
1988 Ivan Sutherland
For his pioneering and visionary contributions to computer graphics, starting with Sketchpad, and continuing after
1989 William Kahan
For his fundamental contributions to numerical analysis. One of the foremost experts on floating-point computations, Kahan has dedicated himself to "making the world safe for numerical computations!"
1990 Fernando J Corbató
For his pioneering work organizing the concepts and leading the development of the general-purpose, large-scale, time-sharing and resource-sharing computer systems, CTSS and Multics
1991 Robin Milner
For three distinct and complete achievements:
1.   LCF, the mechanization of Scott's Logic of Computable Functions, probably the first theoretically based yet practical tool for machine assisted proof construction;
2.   ML, the first language to include polymorphic type inference together with a type-safe exception-handling mechanism;
3.   CCS, a general theory of concurrency
In addition, he formulated and strongly advanced full abstraction, the study of the relationship between operational and denotational semantics.
1992 Butler Lampson
For contributions to the development of distributed, personal computing environments and the technology for their implementation: workstations, networks, operating systems, programming systems, displays, security and document publishing
1993 Juris Hartmanis and Richard E Stearns
In recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory
1994 Edward Feigenbaum and Raj Reddy
For pioneering the design and construction of large scale artificial intelligence systems, demonstrating the practical importance and potential commercial impact of artificial intelligence technology
1995 Manuel Blum
In recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its application to cryptography and program checking
1996 Amir Pnueli
For seminal work introducing temporal logic into computing science and for outstanding contributions to program and systems verification
1997 Douglas Engelbart
For an inspiring vision of the future of interactive computing and the invention of key technologies to help realize this vision
1998 Jim Gray
For seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation
1999 Fred Brooks
For landmark contributions to computer architecture, operating systems, and software engineering
2000 Andrew Yao
In recognition of his fundamental contributions to the theory of computation, including the complexity-based theory of pseudorandom number generation, cryptography, and communication complexity
2001 Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard
For ideas fundamental to the emergence of object-oriented programming, through their design of the programming languages Simula I and Simula 67
2002 Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman
For their ingenious contribution for making public-key cryptography useful in practice
2003 Alan Kay
For pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing
2004 Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn
For pioneering work on internetworking, including the design and implementation of the Internet's basic communications protocols, TCP/IP, and for inspired leadership in networking
2005 Peter Naur
For fundamental contributions to programming language design and the definition of ALGOL 60, to compiler design, and to the art and practice of computer programming
2006 Frances Allen
For pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of optimizing compiler techniques that laid the foundation for modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel execution
2007 Edmund M Clarke,  E Allen Emerson and Joseph Sifakis
For their roles in developing model checking into a highly effective verification technology, widely adopted in the hardware and software industries
2008 Barbara Liskov
For contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing
2009 Charles P Thacker
For his pioneering design and realization of the Xerox Alto, the first modern personal computer, and in addition for his contributions to the Ethernet and the Tablet PC
2010 Leslie Valiant
For transformative contributions to the theory of computation, including the theory of probably approximately correct (PAC) learning, the complexity of enumeration and of algebraic computation, and the theory of parallel and distributed computing
2011 Judea Pearl
For fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning
2012 Silvio Micali and  Shafi Goldwasser
For transformative work that laid the complexity-theoretic foundations for the science of cryptography and in the process pioneered new methods for efficient verification of mathematical proofs in complexity theory
2013 Leslie Lamport
For fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems, notably the invention of concepts such as causality and logical clocks, safety and liveness, replicated state machines, and sequential consistency
2014 Michael Stonebraker
For fundamental contributions to the concepts and practices underlying modern database systems
2015 Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman
For fundamental contributions to modern cryptography. Diffie and Hellman's groundbreaking 1976 paper, "New Directions in Cryptography", introduced the ideas of public-key cryptography and digital signatures, which are the foundation for most regularly-used security protocols on the Internet today.
2016 Tim Berners-Lee
For inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale
2017 John L Hennessy and David Patterson
For pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures with enduring impact on the microprocessor industry
2018 Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun
For conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing
2019 Edwin Catmull and Pat Hanrahan
For fundamental contributions to 3-D computer graphics, and the revolutionary impact of these techniques on computer-generated imagery (CGI) in filmmaking and other applications
2020 Alfred Aho and Jeffrey Ullman
For fundamental algorithms and theory underlying programming language implementation and for synthesizing these results and those of others in their highly influential books, which educated generations of computer scientists
2021 Jack Dongarra
For pioneering contributions to numerical algorithms and libraries that enabled high performance computational software to keep pace with exponential hardware improvements for over four decades
2022 Robert Metcalfe
For the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet
2023 Avi Wigderson
For reshaping our understanding of the role of randomness in computation, and for decades of intellectual leadership in theoretical computer science