C. A. R. Hoare

Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare, also known less formally as Tony Hoare, is a British computer scientist, probably best known for his discovery of Quicksort, the world's most widely used sorting algorithm, and perhaps even the world's most widely used algorithm of any kind, in 1960. He also developed Hoare logic, and the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) used to specify the interactions of concurrent processes.

He was an Emeritus Professor of Computing at the University of Oxford and is now a senior researcher at Microsoft Research (http://research.microsoft.com/) in Cambridge, England.

He received the 1980 ACM Turing Award for "his fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages". The award was presented to him at the ACM Annual Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 27, 1980, by Walter Carlson[?], Chairman of the Awards committee. In his speech[1] (http://www.braithwaite-lee.com/opinions/p75-hoare.pdf), Hoare made the following oft-quoted humorous claim:-

"I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

External links

• Short biography (http://research.microsoft.com/users/thoare/)
• The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture (http://www.braithwaite-lee.com/opinions/p75-hoare.pdf) - a transcript of Hoare's speech