Alan Perlis

Alan Jay Perlis (Pittsburgh, USA, April 1, 1922 - Connecticut, February 7, 1990) was an American professor of computer science who won the Turing Award in 1966 and was president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) from 1962 to 1964.

Perlis was born on April 1, 1922 in Pittsburgh, United States. He received a bachelor's degree in chemistry from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and served for three years in the US Air Force during World War II. Upon his return to the United States, he completed his master's and doctoral degrees in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he also worked in the university's Ballistics Research Laboratory.

In 1952 he began working as a laboratory assistant at Purdue University and later became a professor of mathematics at the same school. At Carnegie Mellon University he headed the Departments of Mathematics (1960-1964) and Computer Science (1965-1971) and at Yale University he was head of the Department of Computer Science from 1976 to 1980, after a brief interruption in the 1977 school year. -1978, when he worked as a professor at the California Institute of Technology.

His area of expertise was programming languages. In 1957 he headed a committee of the Association for Computing Machinery in the United States to design a "universal programming language"; which culminated in the creation of ALGOL-60, an ancestor of Pascal. He also wrote some of the most outstanding programming texts of the XX century.

In recognition of his contributions to the field of computing, he was awarded the first Turing Award in history in 1966.

Died February 7, 1990 in New Haven, Connecticut.