C. A. R. Hoare

Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (Tony Hoare or C.A.R. Hoare, born January 11, 1934) is a British computer scientist, probably best known for the development 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 and the inspiration for the Occam programming language.

Born in Colombo (Sri Lanka) to British parents, he received his Bachelor's degree in Classics from the University of Oxford in 1956. He remained an extra year at Oxford studying graduate-level statistics, and then studied computer translation of human languages at Moscow State University in Russia. In 1960, he started working at Elliot Brothers, Ltd, a small computer manufacturing firm, where he implemented ALGOL 60 and began developing algorithms in earnest. He became a Professor of Computing Science at Queen's University, Belfast in 1968, and in 1977 moved back to Oxford as a Professor of Computing. He is now an Emeritus Professor there, and is also a senior researcher at Microsoft Research 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.

Trivia

Interestingly enough, despite being one of the most lauded computer scientists of his age, it is said he didn't touch a computer before he retired.

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 speeches:C. A. R. Hoare