Tony Hoare is a computer scientist who has made fundamental contributions to computer programming language design and definition. His development of what is now known as ‘Hoare logic’ allows software engineers to check a program’s formal ‘correctness’ — that it behaves as intended. Nowadays, software engineering design aids are available to assist in this check.

As a young researcher in 1960, speculating on machine translation of languages, Tony developed what is one of the world’s most popular sorting algorithms — the recursion-based Quicksort. Tony’s proposals for the concurrent programming language of Communicating Sequential Processes were influential in the development of the transputer machine architecture.

On retirement from academia at the University of Oxford, Tony joined Microsoft Research as a principal researcher. His later interests included unifying the wide range of theories relating to different programming languages. Amongst Tony’s many awards are the A. M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, the Kyoto Prize for Information Science and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal. He was knighted for services to education and computer science in 2000.