Artifact Details

Title

Hoare, Sir Anthony (Charles Antony) oral history

Catalog Number

102658017

Type

Document

Description

Sir Antony Hoare is a senior researcher in the Programming Principles and Tools group at Microsoft Research Cambridge (U.K.)

Hoare's interest in computing was awakened in the early 1950s when he became fascinated by the power of logic and mathematics as a system for proving mathematical certainties. In 1959, while studying machine translation of languages in Moscow, he invented the now well-known sorting algorithm Quicksort.

He returned to England the following year and worked as a programmer for Elliott Brothers, a small British scientific computer manufacturer, designing the first commercial Algol 60 compiler. Hoare continued at Elliot Brothers as Chief Engineer, guiding a series of difficult projects until 1968 when he became Professor of Computing Science at Queen's University, Belfast.

Throughout much of the 1960s and 1970s, a central concern among computer scientists was a 'software crisis' caused by the increasing complexity of computer software and systems. This inspired Hoare, who moved to Oxford University in 1977, to devise a system of logical rules (now known as ‘Hoare's Logic’) that any programmer could follow, in the process helping to move the writing of software from a somewhat mystical discipline into a field with solid foundations.

Other results of his research include the Z specification language, the CSP concurrent programming model, and a method of analyzing the performance of parallel computing systems.

Date

2006-09-08

Contributor

Bowen, Jonathan P., Interviewer
Hoare, C. A. R., Interviewee

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Cambridge, United Kingdom

Extent

25 p.

Category

Transcription

Subject

Logic; Mathematics; Quicksort; Elliott Brothers; Algol 60 compiler; ALGOL; software crisis; Hoare's Logic; Hoare, Sir Antony; Hoare, C.A.R.; Hoare, Tony; Z specification language; CSP concurrent programming model; Parallel computing performance analysis; Fellow Award Honoree

Collection Title

Oral history collection

Lot Number

X3698.2007