Alan Perlis

This article is about the computer scientist. For the Malaysian State, see Perlis.

Alan J. Perlis
Born	(1922-04-01)April 1, 1922 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died	February 7, 1990(1990-02-07) (aged 67) New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Carnegie Mellon (B.S., Chemistry, 1943) MIT (M.S., Mathematics, 1949; Ph.D., Mathematics, 1950)
Known for	IT, ALGOL
Awards	Turing Award (1966) Computer Pioneer Award (1985)
Scientific career
Fields	Computer Science
Institutions	Association for Computing Machinery Carnegie Mellon University Yale University Purdue University
Thesis	On Integral Equations, Their Solution by Iteration and Analytic Continuation  (1950)
Doctoral advisor	Philip Franklin
Doctoral students	Gary Lindstrom Zohar Manna David Parnas

Alan Jay Perlis (April 1, 1922 – February 7, 1990) was an American computer scientist and professor at Purdue University, Carnegie Mellon University and Yale University. He is best known for his pioneering work in programming languages and was the first recipient of the Turing Award.

Biography

Perlis was born to a Jewish family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1943, he received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army, where he became interested in mathematics. He then earned both a master's degree (1949) and a Ph.D. (1950) in mathematics at MIT. His doctoral dissertation was titled "On Integral Equations, Their Solution by Iteration and Analytic Continuation".

In 1952, he participated in Project Whirlwind. He joined the faculty at Purdue University and then moved to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1956. He was chair of mathematics and then the first head of the Computer Science Department. He was elected president of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1962.

He was awarded the Turing Award in 1966, according to the citation, for his influence in the area of advanced programming techniques and compiler construction. This is a reference to the work he had done as a member of the team that developed the ALGOL programming language.

In 1971, Perlis moved to Yale University to become the chair of Computer Science and hold the Eugene Higgins chair. Perlis was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1977.

In 1982, he wrote an article, Epigrams on Programming, for ACM's SIGPLAN journal, describing in one-sentence distillations many of the things he had learned about programming over his career. The epigrams have been widely quoted. He remained at Yale until his death in 1990.

Publications

Publications, a selection:

• 1965. An introductory course in computer programming. With Robert T. Braden.
• 1970. A view of programming languages. With Bernard A. Galler
• 1975. Introduction to computer science
• 1981. Software Metrics: An Analysis and Evaluation. With Frederick Sayward and Mary Shaw

About Alan Perlis

• Denning, Peter J. (May 1990). "Alan J. Perlis—1922–1990: a founding father of computer science as a separate discipline". Communications of the ACM. 33 (5). doi:10.1145/78607.214943.
• Cheatham, Thomas (1978). "ALGOL session". History of Programming Languages (PDF). New York, NY: ACM Press. p. 171. doi:10.1145/800025.1198357. Retrieved 2007-09-18.

See also

• List of pioneers in computer science

External links

• Oral history interview with Allen Newell at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Newell discusses the development of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, including the work of Perlis and Raj Reddy, and the growth of the computer science and artificial intelligence research communities.
• Alan J. Perlis Papers, 1942–1989. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis