File:John_Backus_2.jpg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons
John Backus
Sign in to saveAlso known as John Warner Backus, John W. Backus
American computer scientist (1924–2007)
OverviewAI-generated
John Backus (1924–2007) was an author and person associated with the country of Germany. His written works include *The Acoustical Foundations of Music - Musical Sound*, *Questions and Problems for the Acoustical Foundations of Music*, and *The acoustical foundations of music*. He has an Erdős number of 5.
Backus is recognized in the American Academy Arts Sciences collection and the Turing Award collection. His profile is referenced by 688 other encyclopedia articles.
Synthesized by Vinony from 17 facts across 7 sources: Wikidata, Last.fm, Crossref, MusicBrainz, Open Library, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.
Person · Open Library
- Works
- 3
Top works
- THE ACOUSTICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MUSIC - MUSICAL SOUND
- Questions and Problems for the Acoustical Foundations of Music
- The acoustical foundations of music
via Open Library + Wikidata
Listeners · Last.fm
- Listeners
- 2
- Total plays
- 2
<a href="https://www.last.fm/music/John+Backus">Read more on Last.fm</a>
Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
- Generalized Gradient Approximation Made Simple
· 1996 · cited 204,297x
- Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold
· 2021 · cited 43,514x
- Gene Ontology: tool for the unification of biology
· 2000 · cited 36,878x
- Matplotlib: A 2D Graphics Environment
· 2007 · cited 35,530x
- The MOS 36-ltem Short-Form Health Survey (SF-36)
· 1992 · cited 29,118x
via Crossref · CC0
Quotes
- “Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantics are precise tools for describing and understanding conventional programs, but they only talk about them and cannot alter their ungainly properties. Unlike von Neumann languages, the language of ordinary algebra is suitable both for stating its laws and for transforming an equation into its solution, all within the "language."”
- “Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.”
- “You need the willingness to fail all the time. You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work .”
via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA
~7 min read
Encyclopedic overview
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".
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “John Backus” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.