Tony Hoare

Turing Award winner and former Oxford professor Tony Hoare passed away last Thursday at the age of 92. Hoare is famous for quicksort, ALGOL, and CSP.

I think Quicksort is one of the most elegant algorithm from a mathematical and combinatory point of view. Is also the only algorithm you find in C Standard library (type man 3 qsort).

During the end of my Univesity I started study Advanced programming language course, and I discovered (!) that Communicating sequential processes’s author was the same Tony Hoare!

Developed in 1978, CSP is a formal language for describing patterns of interaction in concurrent systems. It is a member of the family of mathematical theories of concurrency known as process algebras, based on message passing via channels. It is a formal language, but best ‘real’ concurrent languages (like Occam and Erlang) models CSP concepts in the same way.

These two gem should be enough to describe the genius. But Tony developed Algol too and have dozen of awards (including yhe Turing one, for sure).

Last but not least, every time you see a null pointer exeception, remember he inveted it (he apologize for it).

For a longer discussion see this articles of Jim Miles.