Happy Birthday to #ACMTuringAward recipient Barbara Liskov! She received the award in 2008 for contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing. Liskov made history as only the second woman ever to receive the ACM A.M. Turing Award, honored for her foundational contributions to programming languages and system design. In this video, Liskov talks about how she invent

Happy Birthday, Martin Hellman! Martin Hellman received the #ACMTuringAward in 2015 for inventing and promulgating both asymmetric public-key #cryptography, including its application to digital signatures, and a practical cryptographic key-exchange method. In this video, Martin Hellman discusses his Ph.D. thesis work, “Learning with Finite Memory.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umVSICLdrhM&t=2s | ACM - Association for Computing Machinery

Happy Birthday, Silvio Micali! Micali received the #ACMTuringAward in 2012 along with Shafi Goldwasser, for transformative work that laid the complexity-theoretic foundations for the science of cryptography, and in the process pioneered new methods for efficient verification of mathematical proofs in complexity theory. In this video, Micali describes the familial roots of his interest in interactive proofs and introduces his work on zero knowledge proofs: https://youtu.be/LXF882rEIj8 | ACM - Ass

Today in #ComputingHistory in 1956, IBM released the first FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation) manual, six months before the compiler was even ready. Developed under John Backus, FORTRAN introduced the idea that computers could be programmed in a high-level, human-readable language. The manual’s early release let scientists and engineers begin learning and preparing programs before they could actually run them, setting the stage for the 1957 debut of the revolutionary FORTRAN compiler, which transform

Happy Birthday, John E. Hopcroft! Hopcroft received the #ACMTuringAward with Robert E. Tarjan in 1986 for fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures. Hopcroft’s work on graph algorithms was not just theoretical analysis, it also included synthesis. He explored efficient structures for storing data in a computer, and created efficient algorithms for solving the problems they could represent. This work, new and exciting at the time, is now part of the sta