John Backus
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John Backus was an American computer scientist who lived from 1924 to 2007 and made significant contributions to the field of computing. He is best known for his work on early programming languages and computer systems that helped shape how we write software today.
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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".
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1924 births2007 deaths20th-century American mathematicians21st-century American mathematiciansColumbia University alumniColumbia University School of General Studies alumniDraper Prize winnersFellows of the American Academy of Arts and SciencesFortranIBM FellowsIBM Research computer scientistsMathematicians from Philadelphia