John Backus

Submitted by editor on Fri, 03/11/2011 - 00:56

John Backus

John Backus

Born December 3, 1924(1924-12-03)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died March 17, 2007(2007-03-17) (aged 82)
Ashland, Oregon
Fields Computer Science
Institutions IBM
Alma mater Columbia University
Known for Speedcoding
FORTRAN
ALGOL
Backus-Naur form
Function-level programming
Notable awards ACM Turing Award
Draper Prize

John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming language (FORTRAN) and was the inventor of the Backus-Naur form (BNF), the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax. He also did research in function-level programming and helped to popularize it.

The IEEE awarded Backus the W.W. McDowell Award in 1967 for the development of FORTRAN. He received the National Medal of Science in 1975, and the 1977 ACM Turing Award “for profound, influential, and lasting contributions to the design of practical high-level programming systems, notably through his work on FORTRAN, and for publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages.”

Contents

Life and career

Backus was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and grew up in nearby Wilmington, Delaware. He studied at the The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and was apparently not a diligent student. After entering the University of Virginia to study chemistry, he quit and was conscripted into the U.S. Army. He began medical training at Haverford College and, during an internship at a hospital, he was diagnosed with a cranial bone tumor, which was successfully removed; a plate was installed in his head, and he ended medical training after nine months and a subsequent operation to replace the plate with one of his own design.

After moving to New York City he trained initially as a radio technician and became interested in mathematics. He graduated from Columbia University with a Master's degree in mathematics in 1949, and joined IBM in 1950. During his first three years, he worked on the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC); his first major project was to write a program to calculate positions of the Moon. In 1953 Backus developed the language Speedcoding, the first high-level language created for an IBM computer.

Programming was very difficult, and in 1954 Backus assembled a team to define and develop Fortran for the IBM 704 computer. Fortran was the first high-level programming language to be put to broad use.

Backus made another, critical contribution to early computer science: during the latter part of the 1950s Backus served on the international committees which developed ALGOL 58 and the very influential ALGOL 60, which quickly became the de facto worldwide standard for publishing algorithms. Backus developed the Backus-Naur Form (BNF), in the UNESCO report on ALGOL 58. It was a formal notation able to describe any context-free programming language, and was important in the development of compilers. This contribution helped Backus win the Turing Award.

He later worked on a "function-level" programming language known as FP which was described in his Turing Award lecture "Can Programming be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?". Sometimes viewed as Backus's apology for creating FORTRAN, this paper did less to garner interest in the FP language than to spark research into functional programming in general. An FP interpreter was distributed with the 4.2BSD Unix operating system. FP was strongly inspired by Kenneth E. Iverson’s APL, even using a non-standard character set. Backus spent the latter part of his career developing FL (from "Function Level"), a successor to FP. FL was an internal IBM research project, and development of the language essentially stopped when the project was finished (only a few papers documenting it remain), but many of the language's innovative, arguably important ideas have now been implemented in versions of the J programming language.

Backus was named an IBM Fellow in 1963, and was awarded a degree honoris causa from the Henri Poincaré University in Nancy (France) in 1989 and a Draper Prize in 1993. He retired in 1991 and died at his home in Ashland, Oregon on March 17, 2007.

Awards and honors

  • Named an IBM Fellow (1963)
  • Awarded W.W. McDowell Award (1967)
  • Received National Medal of Science (1975)
  • Awarded ACM Turing Award (1977)
  • Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1985)
  • Awarded degree honoris causa from the Université Henri Poincaré (1989)
  • Awarded Draper Prize (1993)
  • Awarded Computer History Museum Fellow Award (1997)
  • Asteroid 6830 Johnbackus named in his honor (June 1, 2007) †

  1. ^ a b "W. Wallace McDowell Award". http://www.computer.org/portal/site/ieeecs/menuitem.c5efb9b8ade9096b8a9ca0108bcd45f3/index.jsp?&pName=ieeecs_level1&path=ieeecs/about/awards&file=WallaceMcD_recipients.xml&xsl=generic.xsl&. Retrieved 2008-04-15. 
  2. ^ a b "The President's National Medal of Science: John Backus". National Science Foundation. http://www.nsf.gov/od/nms/recip_details.cfm?recip_id=25. Retrieved 2007-03-21. 
  3. ^ a b "ACM Turing Award Citation: John Backus". Association for Computing Machinery. Archived from the original on February 4, 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20070204114319/http://www.acm.org/awards/turing_citations/backus.html. Retrieved 2007-03-22. 
  4. ^ a b c Lohr, Steve (2007-03-20). "John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/business/20backus.html. Retrieved 2007-03-21. 
  5. ^ "Inventor of the Week Archive John Backus". 2006-02. http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/backus.html. Retrieved 2011-08-25. 
  6. ^ Grady Booch (interviewer) (2006-09-25). "Oral History of John Backus" (pdf). http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Backus_John/Backus_John_1.oral_history.2006.102657970.pdf. Retrieved 2009-08-17. 
  7. ^ Allen, F.E.. "The History of Language Processor Technology in IBM". IBM Journal of Research Development 25 (5, September 1981). 
  8. ^ a b "John Backus". IBM Archives. http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/builders/builders_backus.html. Retrieved 2007-03-21. 
  9. ^ a b "John Backus". http://www.thocp.net/biographies/backus_john.htm. Retrieved 2008-04-15. 
  10. ^ a b "Recipients of the Charles Stark Draper Prize". http://www.nae.edu/nae/awardscom.nsf/weblinks/NAEW-4NHMN6?OpenDocument. Retrieved 2007-03-26. 
  11. ^ "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter B". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMembers/ChapterB.pdf. Retrieved 28 April 2011. 
  12. ^ "Fellow Awards 1997 Recipient John Backus". http://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/index.php?id=70. Retrieved 2008-04-15. 
A. M. Turing Award laureates

Alan Perlis (1966) · Maurice Vincent Wilkes (1967) · Richard Hamming (1968) · Marvin Minsky (1969) · James H. Wilkinson (1970) · John McCarthy (1971) · Edsger W. Dijkstra (1972) · Charles Bachman (1973) · Donald Knuth (1974) · Allen Newell / Herbert Simon (1975) · Michael O. Rabin / Dana Scott (1976) · John Backus (1977) · Robert W. Floyd (1978) · Kenneth E. Iverson (1979) · Tony Hoare (1980) · Edgar F. Codd (1981) · Stephen Cook (1982) · Ken Thompson / Dennis Ritchie (1983) · Niklaus Wirth (1984) · Richard Karp (1985) · John Hopcroft / Robert Tarjan (1986) · John Cocke (1987) · Ivan Sutherland (1988) · William Kahan (1989) · Fernando J. Corbató (1990) · Robin Milner (1991) · Butler Lampson (1992) · Juris Hartmanis / Richard Stearns (1993) · Edward Feigenbaum / Raj Reddy (1994) · Manuel Blum (1995) · Amir Pnueli (1996) · Douglas Engelbart (1997) · Jim Gray (1998) · Fred Brooks (1999) · Andrew Yao (2000) · Ole-Johan Dahl / Kristen Nygaard (2001) · Ron Rivest / Adi Shamir / Leonard Adleman (2002) · Alan Kay (2003) · Vint Cerf / Bob Kahn (2004) · Peter Naur (2005) · Frances E. Allen (2006) · Edmund M. Clarke / E. Allen Emerson / Joseph Sifakis (2007) · Barbara Liskov (2008) · Charles P. Thacker (2009) · Leslie G. Valiant (2010)
United States National Medal of Science laureates
 Mathematical, statistical, and computer sciences
1960s

1963: Norbert Wiener · 1964: Solomon Lefschetz · H. Marston Morse · 1965: Oscar Zariski · 1966: John Milnor · 1967: Paul Cohen · 1968: Jerzy Neyman · 1969: William Feller
1970s

1970: Richard Brauer · 1973: John Tukey · 1974: Kurt Gödel · 1975: John W. Backus · Shiing-Shen Chern · George Dantzig · 1976: Kurt Otto Friedrichs · Hassler Whitney · 1979: Joseph Leo Doob · Donald E. Knuth
1980s

1982: Marshall Harvey Stone · 1983: Herman Goldstine · Isadore Singer · 1986: Peter Lax · Antoni Zygmund · 1987: Raoul Bott · Michael Freedman · 1988: Ralph E. Gomory · Joseph B. Keller · 1989: Samuel Karlin · Saunders MacLane · Donald C. Spencer
1990s

1990: George F. Carrier · Stephen Cole Kleene · John McCarthy · 1991: Alberto Calderón · 1992: Allen Newell · 1993: Martin David Kruskal · 1994: John Cocke · 1995: Louis Nirenberg · 1996: Richard Karp · Stephen Smale · 1997: Shing-Tung Yau · 1998: Cathleen Synge Morawetz · 1999: Felix Browder · Ronald R. Coifman
2000s

2000: John Griggs Thompson · Karen K. Uhlenbeck · 2001: Calyampudi R. Rao · Elias M. Stein · 2002: James G. Glimm · 2003: Carl R. de Boor · 2004: Dennis P. Sullivan · 2005: Bradley Efron · 2006: Hyman Bass · 2007: Leonard Kleinrock · Andrew J. Viterbi · 2009: David B. Mumford
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