Turing Award facts for kids

Kids Encyclopedia Facts

Quick facts for kids ACM Turing Award
Alan Turing, the award's namesake
Presented by	Association for Computing Machinery
Country	United States
Reward	US$1,000,000
First awarded	1966; 59 years ago (1966)
Last awarded	2025

The ACM A. M. Turing Award is a very important yearly prize. It is given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). This award celebrates people who have made huge and lasting contributions to computer science. Many people call it the "Nobel Prize of Computing" because it's the top award in the field.

The award is named after Alan Turing. He was a British mathematician. Alan Turing is often seen as the person who started the ideas behind theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. He also played a key role in breaking secret codes, like the Enigma cipher, during World War II.

From 2007 to 2013, the award came with a prize of $250,000. Companies like Intel and Google helped pay for this. Since 2014, the prize has been a big $1 million, with Google providing the money.

The very first person to win the award was Alan Perlis in 1966. The youngest winner was Donald Knuth in 1974, when he was just 36 years old. The oldest winner was Alfred Aho in 2020, at 79 years old. Only three women have won this award: Frances Allen (in 2006), Barbara Liskov (in 2008), and Shafi Goldwasser (in 2012). As of 2025, 79 people have received the prize. The most recent winners in 2024 were Andrew Barto and Richard S. Sutton.

What is the Turing Award?
- Why is it called the Turing Award?
- Who gives out the award?
Notable Turing Award Winners
Images for kids
See also

What is the Turing Award?

The Turing Award honors people who have made amazing discoveries in computer science. These discoveries must have a big and lasting impact on how computers work and how we use them. It's like a lifetime achievement award for computer geniuses!

Why is it called the Turing Award?

The award is named after Alan Turing. He was a brilliant mathematician from Britain. Turing helped create the very first ideas for computers and smart machines (artificial intelligence). He also helped the Allies win World War II by cracking secret codes. His work was super important for the future of computing.

Who gives out the award?

The award is given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). This is a large group of computer professionals and scientists. They decide who deserves this special recognition each year.

Notable Turing Award Winners

Many incredible people have won the Turing Award for their groundbreaking work. Here are some of the key areas they have contributed to:

Early Pioneers in Computing

Maurice Wilkes (1967): He built one of the first computers that could store its own programs. This was a huge step forward!
Richard Hamming (1968): He worked on ways to find and fix errors in computer code. This makes computers much more reliable.
John McCarthy (1971): He was a leader in the field of artificial intelligence. He helped shape how we think about smart machines.

Programming Language Innovators

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1972): He helped create ALGOL, a very clear and precise programming language. He also taught us a lot about how programming languages work.
Donald Knuth (1974): He wrote famous books called "The Art of Computer Programming." These books taught many people how to design computer programs and understand how fast they run.
John Backus (1977): He helped create FORTRAN, one of the first widely used programming languages. He also developed ways to describe programming languages clearly.
Tony Hoare (1980): He made important contributions to how programming languages are designed.
Niklaus Wirth (1984): He developed several important programming languages like Pascal and Modula. These languages helped teach many students how to code.

Database and Operating System Experts

Charles Bachman (1973): He made big contributions to database technology. Databases are how computers store and organize huge amounts of information.
Edgar F. Codd (1981): He developed the idea of relational databases. This is a very common way that databases are structured today.
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (1983): They created the UNIX operating system. UNIX is a very important operating system that influenced many others, including Linux and macOS.
Fernando J. Corbató (1990): He led the development of systems that allowed many people to use one computer at the same time. This was called "time-sharing."
Jim Gray (1998): He made key contributions to databases and how computers handle many tasks at once (transaction processing).
Michael Stonebraker (2014): He made fundamental contributions to how modern database systems are designed.

Artificial Intelligence and Graphics Gurus

Marvin Minsky (1969): He was a central figure in creating and advancing the field of artificial intelligence.
Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon (1975): They made basic contributions to artificial intelligence and how humans think.
Edward Feigenbaum and Raj Reddy (1994): They pioneered large-scale artificial intelligence systems. Their work showed how useful AI could be in real life.
Douglas Engelbart (1997): He had amazing ideas for how people could interact with computers. He also invented key technologies like the computer mouse!
Judea Pearl (2011): He made important contributions to artificial intelligence by developing ways for computers to reason with probabilities and causes.
Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun (2018): They made huge breakthroughs in deep neural networks. These are a key part of today's artificial intelligence, like facial recognition and language translation.
Edwin Catmull and Pat Hanrahan (2019): They made fundamental contributions to 3-D computer graphics. Their work changed how computer-generated imagery (CGI) is used in movies and other applications.

Internet and Security Heroes

Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn (2004): They did pioneering work on the internetworking. They designed and built the basic rules for how the internet works, called TCP/IP.
Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman (2002): They created the RSA algorithm. This is a very important method for keeping information secret and secure on the internet, known as public-key cryptography.
Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman (2015): They made fundamental contributions to modern cryptography. Their ideas of public-key cryptography and digital signatures are used in almost all internet security today.
Tim Berners-Lee (2016): He invented the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the basic rules that allow the Web to work and grow so much.
Robert Metcalfe (2022): He invented and helped make Ethernet a standard. Ethernet is how many computers connect to networks, like in your school or home.

Other Important Contributions

Stephen Cook (1982): He greatly improved our understanding of how complex computations are.
Richard M. Karp (1985): He made continuing contributions to the theory of algorithms, including understanding NP-completeness, which helps us know how hard some problems are for computers to solve.
John Hopcroft and Robert Tarjan (1986): They made fundamental achievements in designing and analyzing algorithms and data structures.
William Kahan (1989): He made important contributions to numerical analysis, especially how computers handle numbers with decimal points (floating-point computations).
Robin Milner (1991): He made several important contributions to programming language theory and how computer systems work together.
Butler Lampson (1992): He contributed to the development of personal computers, networks, and operating systems.
Juris Hartmanis and Richard E. Stearns (1993): They laid the groundwork for the field of computational complexity theory, which studies how much time and resources computers need to solve problems.
Manuel Blum (1995): He contributed to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its use in cryptography (secret codes).
Amir Pnueli (1996): He introduced temporal logic to computer science, which helps verify that programs and systems work correctly over time.
Fred Brooks (1999): He made landmark contributions to computer architecture, operating systems, and software engineering.
Andrew Yao (2000): He made fundamental contributions to the theory of computation, including how computers generate random-like numbers and how cryptography works.
Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard (2001): They developed the programming languages Simula I and Simula 67, which were key to the idea of object-oriented programming.
Alan Kay (2003): He pioneered many ideas behind modern object-oriented programming languages and led the team that developed Smalltalk. He also made fundamental contributions to personal computing.
Peter Naur (2005): He made fundamental contributions to programming language design, especially ALGOL 60, and to compiler design.
Frances Allen (2006): She made pioneering contributions to how compilers optimize code, making programs run faster.
Edmund M. Clarke, E. Allen Emerson, and Joseph Sifakis (2007): They developed model checking, a powerful way to check if hardware and software designs are correct.
Barbara Liskov (2008): She made important contributions to programming language and system design, especially related to how data is organized and how systems handle errors.
Charles P. Thacker (2009): He designed the Xerox Alto, which was the first modern personal computer. He also contributed to Ethernet.
Leslie Valiant (2010): He made transformative contributions to the theory of computation, including how computers learn.
Silvio Micali and Shafi Goldwasser (2012): They laid the foundations for the science of cryptography and developed new ways to verify mathematical proofs.
Leslie Lamport (2013): He made fundamental contributions to how distributed computer systems work, especially how they keep track of time and order events.
John L. Hennessy and David Patterson (2017): They pioneered a systematic way to design and evaluate computer architectures, which had a lasting impact on the microprocessor industry.
Alfred Aho and Jeffrey Ullman (2020): They created fundamental algorithms and theories for how programming languages are put into action. Their influential books taught many computer scientists.
Jack Dongarra (2021): He made pioneering contributions to numerical algorithms and libraries. These help high-performance computers keep up with faster hardware.
Avi Wigderson (2023): He changed our understanding of how randomness is used in computing and was a leader in theoretical computer science for decades.
Andrew Barto and Richard S. Sutton (2024): They developed the basic ideas and methods for reinforcement learning. This is a type of artificial intelligence where computers learn by trial and error.