John Backus
1924 – 2007 · aged 83
American computer scientist (1924–2007)
- Born
- 3 Dec 1924 · Philadelphia
- Died
- 17 Mar 2007 · Ashland
Life timeline
Their life from birth to death. On the timeline, world events of the time are shown faintly.
- 3 Dec 1924BornBorn in Philadelphia
- 1939 – 1945WarWorld War II
- 1963AwardIBM Fellow
- 1967AwardW. Wallace McDowell Award
- 1975AwardNational Medal of Science
- 1977AwardTuring Award
- 1983AwardHarold Pender Award
- 1984AwardIRI Achievement Award
- 1985AwardFellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- 1989AwardHonorary doctorate of the Henri Poincaré University
- 1993AwardCharles Stark Draper Prize
- 1997AwardComputer History Museum Fellow
- 2004AwardProgramming Languages Achievement Award
- 17 Mar 2007DiedDied in Ashland
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Meanwhile in the world
Major world events during their lifetime (1924 – 2007).
- 1933 – 1945The Holocaust
- 19341934 FIFA World Cup
- 19361936 Summer Olympics
- 1937 – 1945Second Sino-Japanese War
- 19381938 FIFA World Cup
- 1938Munich Agreement
- 1939 – 1940Winter War
- 1940 – 1945Auschwitz concentration camp
- 1941Attack on Pearl Harbor
- 1941 – 1945Eastern Front
- 1941Operation Barbarossa
- 1942 – 1943Battle of Stalingrad
- 1945Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- 1945 – 1946Nuremberg trials
- 19501950 FIFA World Cup
- 1950 – 1953Korean War
- 1953 – 1959Cuban Revolution
- 19541954 FIFA World Cup
- 1955 – 1975Vietnam War
- 1956Hungarian Revolution of 1956
- 1956Suez Crisis
- 19581958 FIFA World Cup
- 1959Antarctic Treaty System
- 19621962 FIFA World Cup
- 1962Cuban Missile Crisis
- 19661966 FIFA World Cup
- 1966 – 1976Cultural Revolution
- 1968Prague Spring
- 1969Apollo 11 Moon landing
- 19721972 Summer Olympics
- 19741974 FIFA World Cup
- 19781978 FIFA World Cup
- 1978 – 1979Iranian Revolution
- 1979 – 1989Soviet–Afghan War
- 1980 – 1988Iran–Iraq War
- 19841984 Summer Olympics
- 1985Schengen Agreement
- 19891989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre
- 1989Fall of the Berlin Wall
- 19901990 FIFA World Cup
Biography
John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist. He led the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of the Backus–Naur form (BNF), a widely used notation to define syntaxes of formal languages. He also contributed to the design of ALGOL, and later researched the function-level programming paradigm, presenting his findings in his influential 1977 Turing Award lecture "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?"
The IEEE awarded Backus the W. W. McDowell Award in 1967 for the development of FORTRAN. He received the National Medal of Science in 1975 and the 1977 ACM Turing Award "for profound, influential, and lasting contributions to the design of practical high-level programming systems, notably through his work on FORTRAN, and for publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages".
John Backus retired in 1991. He died at his home in Ashland, Oregon on March 17, 2007.
Text from the Wikipedia article John Backus, CC BY-SA 4.0
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