The most esteemed award in the fields of Informatics and computing is the Turing Award, named after Alan Turing, a British mathematician and computer scientist, who is widely recognized as the pioneer of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.
A little more, as in a month it will be known who will receive the award in 2023. And today I want to tell you about the award winners who were born in May.
Ron Linn Rivest, born on May 6, is a renowned cryptographer and computer scientist. He will celebrate his 75th birthday this year. Rivest’s work has been in the fields of algorithms and combinatorics, cryptography, machine learning, and election integrity. He is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Rivest is a member of MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Rivest is a co-inventor of the widely used RSA public-key cryptosystem. He has also contributed to the development of several other cryptographic algorithms, including RC2, RC4, RC5, and MD5.
Ron Rivest, together with Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, co-invented the RSA algorithm, a widely used encryption algorithm for securing data transmission. He also created several symmetric key encryption algorithms, including RC2, RC4, RC5, and RC6, with “RC” standing for “Rivest Cipher.” In addition, Rivest designed several cryptographic hash functions, including MD2, MD4, MD5, and MD6. His work in cryptography has been widely recognized, and he has received numerous awards, including the 2002 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award and the 2015 Turing Award along with Shamir and Adleman for their contributions to cryptography. Rivest continues to work as an Institute Professor at MIT and is actively involved in research related to election security and privacy.
Ron Rivest is a highly decorated computer scientist and cryptographer, being a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the International Association for Cryptologic Research, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He, along with Adi Shamir and Len Adleman, has been awarded numerous accolades, including the Secure Computing Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2000 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, and the prestigious Turing Award. Rivest has also received an honorary degree from Sapienza University of Rome and the MITX Lifetime Achievement Award. In addition, he was named a Marconi Fellow in 2007 and an Institute Professor at MIT in 2015.
The next winner of the Turing Award — Edsger Wybe Dijkstra — was born on May 11, 1930. He would have turned 93 this month.
He was a Dutch programmer, software engineer, systems scientist, and science essayist. In 1972, he was awarded the Turing Award for his contributions to developing structured programming languages. He served as the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin from 1984 to 2000. Throughout his career, he made significant contributions to the field of computer science, and was widely recognized for his expertise and insights. His work has had a lasting impact on the field, and he is remembered as one of the pioneers of modern computing.
He passed away in 2002. Prior to his death, he was recognized for his contributions to distributed computing with the ACM PODC Influential Paper Award. The award was renamed the Dijkstra Prize in his honor the following year. This prize continues to recognize significant achievements in the field of distributed computing.
Ivan Edward Sutherland, born on May 16th, 1938, is an American computer scientist and internet pioneer who is widely recognized as a pioneer of computer graphics. In the 1970s, Sutherland’s early work in computer graphics, along with David C. Evans, and their teaching on the subject at the University of Utah, was groundbreaking in the field. Together with their students from that era, they developed several foundations of modern computer graphics. In 1988, Sutherland was awarded the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery for the invention of the Sketchpad, an early version of the graphical user interface that has since become ubiquitous in personal computers. He has been honored with membership in the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and numerous other prestigious awards. In 2012, Sutherland was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology for his “pioneering achievements in the development of computer graphics and interactive interfaces”.
Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) is a prominent American computer scientist who made significant contributions to object-oriented programming and graphical user interface (GUI) design. During his time at Xerox PARC, Kay played a leading role in designing and developing the first modern windowed computer desktop interface, which had a profound impact on the field of computing. He was also instrumental in creating the influential object-oriented programming language Smalltalk and was responsible for coining the term “object-oriented.” His contributions to the field have been recognized by his election as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts. In 2003, he was awarded the prestigious Turing Award for his work in the field of computer science.
Talented individuals often possess skills and abilities across multiple domains.
In addition to his computer science career, Kay has had experience as a professional jazz guitarist, composer, and theatrical designer. He is also an amateur classical pipe organist.
John Cocke (30.05.1925–16.07.2002) was an American computer scientist who made significant contributions to computer architecture and compiler optimization design. He is widely known as the pioneer of reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architecture, which has revolutionized the design of computer processors.
John Cocke, known as the “father of RISC architecture,” achieved notable success in computer architecture and optimizing compiler design, particularly in the IBM 801 minicomputer project where he demonstrated that matching the design of the architecture’s instruction set to the relatively simple instructions emitted by compilers could result in high performance at a low cost. He was a co-inventor of the CYK algorithm, involved in the pioneering work on speech recognition and machine translation at IBM in the 1970s and 1980s, and originated the idea of using a trigram language model for speech recognition, as credited by Frederick Jelinek. In addition to being appointed IBM Fellow in 1972, he was a recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the ACM Turing Award in 1987, the National Medal of Technology in 1991, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2000. He was also a member of several distinguished societies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences, and was posthumously named a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2002.
Cocke passed away in Valhalla, New York in 2002.
