14 Facts About Tony Hoare

Tony Hoare's work earned him the Turing Award, usually regarded as the highest distinction in computer science, in 1980.

Tony Hoare developed Hoare logic, an axiomatic basis for verifying program correctness.

Tony Hoare is credited with development of the null pointer, having introduced it in the ALGOL family of languages.

Tony Hoare was born in Colombo, Ceylon to British parents; his father was a colonial civil servant and his mother was the daughter of a tea planter.

Tony Hoare was educated in England at the Dragon School in Oxford and the King's School in Canterbury.

Tony Hoare then studied Classics and Philosophy at Merton College, Oxford.

Tony Hoare returned to the University of Oxford in 1958 to study for a postgraduate certificate in statistics, and it was here that he began computer programming, having been taught Autocode on the Ferranti Mercury by Leslie Fox.

Tony Hoare then went to Moscow State University as a British Council exchange student, where he studied machine translation under Andrey Kolmogorov.

In 1960, Tony Hoare left the Soviet Union and began working at Elliott Brothers Ltd, a small computer manufacturing firm located in London.

Tony Hoare was involved with developing international standards in programming and informatics, as a member of the International Federation for Information Processing Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi, which specified, maintains, and supports the languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.

Tony 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, following the death of Christopher Strachey.

Tony Hoare is an Emeritus Professor there, and is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England.

For many years under his leadership, Hoare's Oxford department worked on formal specification languages such as CSP and Z These did not achieve the expected take-up by industry, and in 1995 Hoare was led to reflect upon the original assumptions:.

In 1962, Tony Hoare married Jill Pym, a member of his research team.