Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare is a British computer scientist whose foundational contributions run through programming languages, algorithms, operating systems, formal verification and concurrent computing. He developed quicksort in 1959 to 1960 and Hoare logic for verifying program correctness, and won the 1980 Turing Award. He later called his 1965 invention of the null reference his billion dollar mistake, an honest accounting this atlas quotes with approval. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
Birth YearBorn 11 January 1934. AwardFriedrich L. Bauer Prize 2 AwardFellow of the Royal Society 2 AwardHarry H. Goode Memorial Award 2 AwardFellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering 2 AwardComputer History Museum Fellow 2 AwardProgramming Languages Achievement Award 2 Awardhonorary doctor of the University of Madrid Complutense 2 AwardFellow of the British Computer Society 2 AwardKyoto Prize in Advanced Technology 2 AwardIEEE John von Neumann Medal 2 FAQs
What did Tony Hoare mean by his billion dollar mistake?
He meant adding the null reference to ALGOL W in 1965, a design shortcut he came to see as the source of countless errors and crashes.
Hoare used the phrase for his invention of the null reference in 1965. At the time he was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object-oriented language, ALGOL W, with the aim that all use of references should be absolutely safe and checked automatically by the compiler. He has said he could not resist adding a null reference simply because it was so easy to implement. He judged that this led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities and system crashes that have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage over the following forty years.
Connections
Associated With
Formal Methods, Fields Tony Hoare's 1969 paper An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming introduced Hoare logic, a foundational formal system for reasoning about program correctness, already cited on this field's own origin-year fact.
Source Wikipedia: Tony Hoare
Credited
Source Quickselect (Wikipedia)
In Field
Invented
Source Quickselect (Wikipedia)
Source Wikipedia: Quicksort
Long-Form Articles
In the Other Atlases
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Sources
1. Wikipedia: Tony Hoare
Wikimedia FoundationOpening and Research and Career sections
Hoare developed the sorting algorithm quicksort in 1959-1960. He developed Hoare logic, an axiomatic basis for verifying program correctness.
Opening section
Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare
- Associated With: Formal Methods
View the Source 2. Wikidata: Tony Hoare
Wikipedia: Quicksort
Wikimedia FoundationInvented: Quicksort, History sectionQuote, Invented: Quicksort, History section
The quicksort algorithm was developed in 1959 by Tony Hoare while he was a visiting student at Moscow State University.
Quickselect (Wikipedia)
Credited: Quickselect, Intro, lead sentence
Tony Hoare
Invented: Quickselect, Intro, lead sentence
Tony Hoare
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