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Charles Antony Richard Hoare
FLoC 2006
Born	January 11, 1934 (1934-01-11) (age 73) Colombo, Sri Lanka
Field	Computer Scientist
Institutions	Elliott Brothers Queen's University of Belfast Oxford University Moscow State University Microsoft Research
Alma mater	Oxford University Moscow State University
Known for	Quicksort Hoare logic CSP
Notable prizes	ACM Turing Award

Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (Tony Hoare or C.A.R. Hoare, born January 11, 1934) is a British computer scientist, probably best known for the development of Quicksort (or Hoaresort), the world's most widely used sorting algorithm, in 1960. He also developed Hoare logic for verifying program correctness, and the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) used to specify the interactions of concurrent processes (including the Dining philosophers problem) and the inspiration for the Occam programming language.

Born in Colombo (Ceylon, now Sri Lanka) to British parents, he received his Bachelor's degree in Classics from the University of Oxford (Merton College) in 1956. He remained an extra year at Oxford studying graduate-level statistics, and following his National Service in the Royal Navy (1956–1958), when he learned to speak Russian, he studied computer translation of human languages at Moscow State University in the Soviet Union in the school of Kolmogorov.

In 1960, he left the Soviet Union and began working at Elliott Brothers, Ltd, a small computer manufacturing firm, where he implemented ALGOL 60 and began developing algorithms in earnest.^[1] He became a Professor of Computing Science at the Queen's University of Belfast in 1968, and in 1977 moved back to Oxford as a Professor of Computing to lead the Programming Research Group in the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, following the death of Christopher Strachey. He is now an Emeritus Professor there, and is also a senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England.

He is also the originator of the famous quote, "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil."

• He received the 1980 ACM Turing Award for "his fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages". The award was presented to him at the ACM Annual Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 27, 1980, by Walter Carlson, Chairman of the Awards committee. A transcript of Hoare's speech was published in Communications of the ACM.^[1]
• Harry H. Goode Memorial Award in 1981
• On December 18th, 1987, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Science by the Queen's University Belfast.
• In 2000 he was knighted for services to education and computer science.
• On Oct 13, 2006, the Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California inducted him as Fellow of the Museum "for development of the Quicksort algorithm and for lifelong contributions to the theory of programming languages".
• He received an Honorary Doctorate of Science from the Department of Informatics of the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) on September 24th, 2007, in Athens, Greece.

• O.-J. Dahl, E. W. Dijkstra and C. A. R. Hoare (1972). Structured Programming. Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-200550-3. 
• C. A. R. Hoare (1985). Communicating Sequential Processes, (available online at http://www.usingcsp.com/ in PDF format), Prentice Hall International Series in Computer Science. ISBN 0-13-153271-5 hardback or ISBN 0-13-153289-8 paperback. 
• C. A. R. Hoare and M. J. C. Gordon (1992). Mechanised Reasoning and Hardware Design. Prentice Hall International Series in Computer Science. ISBN 0-13-572405-8. 
• C. A. R. Hoare and He Jifeng (1998). Unifying Theories of Programming. Prentice Hall International Series in Computer Science. ISBN 0-13-458761-8. 

1. ^ ^{a b} C.A.R. Hoare (February 1981). "The emperor's old clothes" (PDF). Communications of the ACM 24 (2): 75–83. doi:10.1145/358549.358561. ISSN 0001-0782. 

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

C. A. R. Hoare

• Microsoft home page — short biography
• Oxford University Computing Laboratory home page — Emeritus Professor of Computing
• Advice for Ph.D. students from Tony Hoare — held at the International Summer School Marktoberdorf 2006
• C. A. R. Hoare bibliography in the DBLP database

• The classic article on monitors — The original article on monitors that was republished as a classic of the ACM