John Backus

This article is about the computer scientist. For the physicist, see John Backus (acoustician). For the minister, see John Chester Backus.

John Backus
Backus in December 1989
Born
John Warner Backus

(1924-12-03)December 3, 1924
Wilmington, Delaware
DiedMarch 17, 2007(2007-03-17) (aged 82)
Ashland, Oregon
Alma materUniversity of Virginia
University of Pittsburgh
Haverford College
Columbia University (B.S. 1949, M.S. 1950)
Known forSpeedcoding
FORTRAN
ALGOL
Backus–Naur form
Function-level programming
Spouses
Marjorie Jamison
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​
(m. 1947⁠–⁠1966)​
Barbara Una
​
​
(m. 1968; died 2004)​

Children2
AwardsNational Medal of Science (1975)
Turing Award (1977)
Charles Stark Draper Prize (1993)
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
InstitutionsIBM

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 later did research into the function-level programming paradigm, presenting his findings in his influential 1977 Turing Award lecture "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?"[1]

The IEEE awarded Backus the W. W. McDowell Award in 1967 for the development of FORTRAN.[2] He received the National Medal of Science in 1975[3] and the 1977 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".[4]

John Backus retired in 1991. He died at his home in Ashland, Oregon on March 17, 2007.[5]

  1. ^ Backus, John (August 1978). "Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style?: a functional style and its algebra of programs". Communications of the ACM. 21 (8). doi:10.1145/359576.359579. S2CID 16367522.
  2. ^ "W. Wallace McDowell Award". Archived from the original on September 29, 2007. Retrieved April 15, 2008.
  3. ^ "The President's National Medal of Science: John Backus". National Science Foundation. Archived from the original on September 29, 2007. Retrieved March 21, 2007.
  4. ^ "ACM Turing Award Citation: John Backus". Association for Computing Machinery. Archived from the original on February 4, 2007. Retrieved March 22, 2007.
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference nytobit was invoked but never defined (see the help page).