17 Facts About Barbara Liskov

Barbara Liskov's work was recognized with the 2008 Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science.

Barbara Liskov is currently an Institute Professor and Ford Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Barbara Liskov was born November 7,1939, in Los Angeles, California, to a Jewish family, the eldest of Jane and Moses Huberman's four children.

Barbara Liskov earned her bachelor's degree in mathematics with a minor in physics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961.

Barbara Liskov applied to graduate mathematics programs at Berkeley and Princeton.

Barbara Liskov was accepted at Berkeley but instead moved to Boston and began working at Mitre Corporation, where she became interested in computers and programming.

Barbara Liskov worked at Mitre for one year before taking a programming job at Harvard working on language translation.

Barbara Liskov then decided to go back to school and applied again to Berkeley, but to Stanford and Harvard.

Barbara Liskov has led many significant projects, including the Venus operating system, a small, low-cost timesharing system; the design and implementation of CLU; Argus, the first high-level language to support implementation of distributed programs and to demonstrate the technique of promise pipelining; and Thor, an object-oriented database system.

Barbara Liskov leads the Programming Methodology Group at MIT, with a current research focus in Byzantine fault tolerance and distributed computing.

Barbara Liskov was on the inaugural Engineering and Computer Science jury for the Infosys Prize in 2009.

Barbara Liskov is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Association for Computing Machinery.

In 2004, Barbara Liskov won the John von Neumann Medal for "fundamental contributions to programming languages, programming methodology, and distributed systems".

Barbara Liskov was awarded a Doctorate Honoris Causa by the University of Lugano in 2011 and by Universidad Politecnica de Madrid in 2018.

Barbara Liskov received the 2008 Turing Award from the ACM in March 2009, for her work in the design of programming languages and software methodology that led to the development of object-oriented programming.

Specifically, Barbara Liskov developed two programming languages, CLU in the 1970s and Argus in the 1980s.

Barbara Liskov is the author of five books as of February 2023 and over one hundred technical papers.