Tony Hoare
British computer scientist · 1934–2026
Computer scientist known for Quicksort, Hoare logic and influential work on programming languages.
Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare was born in Colombo, in what was then British Ceylon, but is now Sri Lanka, and studied classics and philosophy at the University of Oxford. During national service he learned Russian, and in 1959, as a visiting student at Moscow State University, he devised Quicksort, which became one of the most widely used sorting algorithms.
Returning to England, he joined the computer manufacturer Elliott Brothers before becoming a professor at Queen’s University Belfast in 1968 and at Oxford in 1977. He developed Hoare logic, a formal system for reasoning about program correctness, and Communicating Sequential Processes, a framework for concurrency.
Hoare received the 1980 ACM Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for fundamental contributions to programming languages and was knighted in 2000 for services to education and computer science.
Quotations
Selected works
A description of Quicksort, a divide-and-conquer sorting algorithm that partitions data around a pivot element and recursively sorts the resulting sections.
An axiomatic method for proving the correctness of computer programs, using logical rules to reason about how statements change program variables.
Hoare's inaugural lecture at Queen's University Belfast, defining computer science as the art of designing efficient and elegant methods for solving problems by computer.
Practical advice on designing programming languages, arguing that they should prioritise simplicity, reliability and the needs of the programmer over elaborate features.
Tony Hoare reflects on his career designing programming languages and software, arguing that reliability depends on simplicity rather than complexity or elaborate features.
An argument that programming should be regarded as a branch of engineering, combining scientific foundations with practical discipline and professional responsibility for reliability.
Hoare's Oxford inaugural lecture, arguing that programming is a mathematical activity and that mathematical methods can ensure programs are correct and reliable.
A formal language and theory for describing systems of concurrent processes that interact by communication, providing a rigorous basis for reasoning about concurrency.
Hoare examines why software had become highly reliable despite little use of formal proof, and how mathematical theory and engineering practice reinforce one another.
A talk in which Hoare reflects on his 1965 invention of the null reference, calling it a mistake that caused decades of costly software errors.
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