Contents
Tony Hoare
Creating quicksort and foundational methods for reasoning about programs.
Quicksort · Hoare logic
- Born
- 11 January 1934
- Birthplace
- Colombo, Sri Lanka
- Died
- 5 March 2026
More people
Tony Hoare
Tony Hoare was a British computer scientist whose work helped make software more precise and reliable. He received the 1980 Turing Award.
Early life
Classical education
Studied classics and philosophy at Oxford.
Computing studies
Later studied statistics and machine translation, including time in Moscow.
Career
- 1960s
Elliott Brothers
Worked on compilers and programming methods in industry.
- 1968–2000
University research
Held professorships in Belfast and Oxford.
- Later career
Microsoft Research
Continued work on software verification in Cambridge.
Selected work
Quicksort
Developed the widely used sorting algorithm.
Hoare logic
Published an approach to proving properties of programs.
Communicating Sequential Processes
Introduced a framework for understanding concurrent systems.
Beyond work
Reflecting on mistakes
Publicly criticised the null-reference design he had introduced earlier in his career.
Family
Married computer scientist Jill Pym.
Sources & photo credit
Life, career and references ↗Further biography and career ↗Wolfson College obituary ↗Photo: Rama. CC BY-SA 2.0 fr · Original image. Cropped and displayed in monochrome.
