We toast the Lisp programming language|Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
Quoted in The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Alan Jay Perlis was an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
computer scientistA computer scientist is a scientist who has acquired knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application in computer systems....
known for his pioneering work in programming languages and the first recipient of the
Turing AwardThe Turing Award, in full The ACM A.M. Turing Award, is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the...
.
Biography
Perlis was born to a Jewish family in
Pittsburgh, PennsylvaniaPittsburgh is the second-largest city in the US Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Allegheny County. Regionally, it anchors the largest urban area of Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley, and nationally, it is the 22nd-largest urban area in the United States...
. In 1943, he received his
bachelor's degreeA bachelor's degree is usually an academic degree awarded for an undergraduate course or major that generally lasts for three or four years, but can range anywhere from two to six years depending on the region of the world...
in
chemistryChemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....
from the
Carnegie Institute of TechnologyThe Carnegie Institute of Technology , is the name for Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering. It was first called the Carnegie Technical Schools, or Carnegie Tech, when it was founded in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie who intended to build a “first class technical school” in Pittsburgh,...
(now
Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....
). During
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, he served in the U.S. Army, where he became interested in mathematics. He then earned both a
master's degreeA master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...
(1949) and a
Ph.D.Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
(1950) in
mathematicsMathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
at MIT. His doctoral dissertation was titled "On
Integral EquationsIn mathematics, an integral equation is an equation in which an unknown function appears under an integral sign. There is a close connection between differential and integral equations, and some problems may be formulated either way...
, Their Solution by Iteration and
Analytic ContinuationIn complex analysis, a branch of mathematics, analytic continuation is a technique to extend the domain of a given analytic function. Analytic continuation often succeeds in defining further values of a function, for example in a new region where an infinite series representation in terms of which...
".
In 1952, he participated in Project Whirlwind. He joined the faculty at
Purdue UniversityPurdue University, located in West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S., is the flagship university of the six-campus Purdue University system. Purdue was founded on May 6, 1869, as a land-grant university when the Indiana General Assembly, taking advantage of the Morrill Act, accepted a donation of land and...
and then moved to the
Carnegie Institute of TechnologyThe Carnegie Institute of Technology , is the name for Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering. It was first called the Carnegie Technical Schools, or Carnegie Tech, when it was founded in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie who intended to build a “first class technical school” in Pittsburgh,...
in 1956. He was chair of mathematics and then the first head of the Computer Science Department. He was elected president of the
Association for Computing MachineryThe Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
in 1962.
He was awarded the Turing Award in 1966, according to the citation,
for his influence in the area of advanced programming techniques and compilerA compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...
construction. This is a reference to the work he had done as a member of the team that developed the ALGOL programming language.
In 1971, Perlis moved to
Yale UniversityYale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
to become the chair of Computer Science and hold the Eugene Higgins chair. Perlis was elected to the
National Academy of EngineeringThe National Academy of Engineering is a government-created non-profit institution in the United States, that was founded in 1964 under the same congressional act that led to the founding of the National Academy of Sciences...
in 1977.
In 1982, he wrote an article,
Epigrams on ProgrammingEpigrams on Programming is an article by Alan Perlis published in 1982, for ACM's SIGPLAN journal. They are a series of short, programming language neutral, humorous statements about computers and programming, which are widely quoted....
, for
ACMThe Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
's SIGPLAN journal, describing in one-sentence distillations many of the things he had learned about programming over his career. The
epigramAn epigram is a brief, interesting, usually memorable and sometimes surprising statement. Derived from the epigramma "inscription" from ἐπιγράφειν epigraphein "to write on inscribe", this literary device has been employed for over two millennia....
s have been widely quoted.
He remained at Yale until his death in 1990.
External links
- Alan J. Perlis Papers, 1942-1989. Charles Babbage Institute
The Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking....
, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
- Oral history interview with Allen Newell at Charles Babbage Institute
The Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking....
, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Newell discusses the development of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, including the work of Perlis and Raj ReddyDabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy , a Turing Award winner, is one of the early pioneers in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence and has served on the faculty of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon University for over 40 years. He was the founding Director of the Robotics Institute at CMU...
, and the growth of the computer science and artificial intelligence research communities.