Alan Perlis

Infobox_Scientist
name = Alan Jay Perlis

---

birth_date = birth date|1922|4|1
birth_place = Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
death_date = death date and age|1990|2|7|1922|4|1
death_place =
nationality = USA
field = Computer Science
work_institution = Association for Computing Machinery
Carnegie Mellon University
Yale University
alma_mater = Carnegie Mellon, MIT
doctoral_advisor = Philip Franklin
doctoral_students = Gary Lindstrom
Zohar Manna
David Parnas
known_for = IT, ALGOL
prizes = Turing Award
footnotes =

Alan Jay Perlis (April 1, 1922 – February 7, 1990) was an American computer scientist known for his pioneering work in programming languages and the first recipient of the Turing Award.

Biography

Perlis was born 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.

Alan is survived by three children and four grandchildren. His children currently live in Rome and Washington D.C.

References

*cite book | last=Cheatham | first=Thomas | chapter=ALGOL session | title=History of Programming Languages | url=http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1200000/1198357/p171-cheatham.pdf?key1=1198357&key2=7908193711&coll=&dl=GUIDE&CFID=15151515&CFTOKEN=6184618| | pages=p. 171 | location=New York, NY | publisher=ACM Press | year=1978 | id=doi|10.1145/800025.1198357 | accessdate=2007-09-18

External links

* [http://special.lib.umn.edu/findaid/xml/cbi00064.xml Alan J. Perlis Papers, 1942-1989] . Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
* [http://www.cbi.umn.edu/oh/display.phtml?id=146 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 Alan J. Perlis and Raj Reddy, and the growth of the computer science and artificial intelligence research communities.

Persondata
NAME= Perlis, Alan Jay
ALTERNATIVE NAMES=
SHORT DESCRIPTION= American computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH= April 1, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH= Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH= February 7, 1990
PLACE OF DEATH=