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Google Quadruples A.M. Turing Award To $1M

Posted by samzenpus on from the sweeten-the-pot dept.

alphadogg writes The Association for Computing Machinery has announced that its annual A.M. Turing Award, sometimes called the Nobel Prize in Computing, will now come with a $1M award courtesy of Google. Previously, the award came with a $250K prize funded by Google and Intel. The award, which goes to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community," is generally doled out in February or March. This past March, the winner was Microsoft Research principal Leslie Lambert. The ACM says the bigger prize should raise the award's visibility.

11 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. Lamport by Pseudonym · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's Leslie Lamport, not Leslie Lambert. If you didn't know that, then you're not a true LaTeX user.

    --
    sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
    1. Re:Lamport by Pseudonym · · Score: 3, Informative

      FYI, Barbara Liskov won the Turing Award a few years ago.

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      sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
    2. Re:Lamport by Mr+Z · · Score: 2

      Indeed!

      A few years back, I was implementing Leslie's Bakery Algorithm. (Which, to be sure, you should look up his original paper, not the bastardizations you sometimes find in textbooks. That paper and more are available here.)

      In my implementation, I wanted to SIMD-ize one of the steps to make it more efficient. I thought the transformation was valid, but wasn't certain, so I emailed Dr. Lamport. I was pleasantly surprised when Leslie actually replied to my email.

      And yes, the transformation was valid. *whew* Our multiprocessor DSP software got a little faster that day.

      Anyway, there's some fascinating stuff on his page full of papers. The link again: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/pubs.html

      --
      Program Intellivision!
    3. Re:Lamport by slimjim8094 · · Score: 2

      That's quite a beard for a woman

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      I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
  2. Leslie who? by SBJ95 · · Score: 2

    Leslie LAMPORT, creator of LaTeX, was the last winner. Glad to see there's editing here.

  3. WTF? by Planar · · Score: 2

    Leslie Lambert??? Is this some kind of joke?

    “Editor: A person employed on a newspaper whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.”
    - Elbert Hubbard

  4. stood on the shoulders of Knuth, creator of Tex by raymorris · · Score: 2

    Lamport, creator of LaTex, just rode the coattails of Donald Knuth, known as the creator of Tex. ;)

    1. Re:stood on the shoulders of Knuth, creator of Tex by rolfwind · · Score: 2

      Knuth won in 1974 though, so fair enough.

      Also, Lamport didn't win for Latex, but for his work on distributed computing.

    2. Re:stood on the shoulders of Knuth, creator of Tex by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      When I program in JavaScript, I feel like I'm standing on the shoulders of midgets.

  5. AM turing award by rossdee · · Score: 2

    I don't want to get up early in the morning - is there a PM turing award?

  6. Official Announcement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The linked article is poorly informed, not to mention full of typos.

    Here is the official announcement, straight from the ACM.