Tony Hoare

Tony Hoare was born in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) on 11 January 1934, to British parents; his father was a colonial civil servant and his mother was the daughter of a tea planter. Hoare was educated in England at the Dragon School in Oxford and the King's School in Canterbury. He then studied Classics and Philosophy ("Greats") at Merton College, Oxford. On graduating in 1956 he did 18 months National Service in the Royal Navy, He returned to the University of Oxford in 1958 to study for a postgraduate certificate in statistics, He then went to Moscow State University as a British Council exchange student, where he studied machine translation under Andrey Kolmogorov. ==Research and career==

In 1960, Hoare left the Soviet Union and began working at Elliott Brothers Ltd, Hoare was involved with developing international standards in programming and informatics, as a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi, which specified, maintains, and supports the languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68. Hoare became the Professor of Computing Science at the Queen's University of Belfast in 1968, and in 1977 returned to Oxford as the Professor of Computing to lead the Programming Research Group in the Oxford University Computing Laboratory (now Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford), following the death of Christopher Strachey. He became the first Christopher Strachey Professor of Computing on its establishment in 1988 until his retirement at Oxford in 2000. He was an Emeritus Professor there, and also a principal researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England. Hoare's most significant work has been in the following areas: his sorting and selection algorithm (Quicksort and Quickselect), Hoare logic, the formal language communicating sequential processes (CSP) used to specify the interactions between concurrent processes (and implemented in various programming languages such as occam), structuring computer operating systems using the monitor concept, and the axiomatic specification of programming languages. ==Personal life and death==

In 1962, Hoare married Jill Pym, a member of his research team, with whom he had three children. He died on 5 March 2026, aged 92. ==Awards and honours==

• ACM Programming Systems and Languages Paper Award (1973) for the paper "Proof of correctness of data representations" • Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society (1978) • Turing Award for "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 27 October 1980, by Walter Carlson, chairman of the Awards committee. A transcript of Hoare's speech was published in Communications of the ACM. • Fellow of the Royal Society (1982) • Honorary Doctorate of Science by the Queen's University Belfast (1987) • Honorary Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford (1998) • Knighted for services to education and computer science (2000) • Kyoto Prize for Information science (2000) • Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering • Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California Fellow of the Museum "for development of the Quicksort algorithm and for lifelong contributions to the theory of programming languages" (2006) • Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University (2007) • Honorary Doctorate of Science from the Department of Informatics of the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) (2007) • Friedrich L. Bauer Prize, Technical University of Munich (2007) • SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award (2011) • IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2011) • Honorary Doctorate, University of Warsaw (2012) • Honorary Doctorate, Complutense University of Madrid (2013) • Royal Medal of the Royal Society (2023) ==Books==

• • Hoare, C. A. R. (1985). Communicating Sequential Processes. Prentice Hall International Series in Computer Science. (hardback) or (paperback). (Available online at http://www.usingcsp.com/ in PDF format.) • • • ==See also==