Alan Perlis

Alan Jay Perlis (1 April 1922 to 7 February 1990) was an American mathematician and computer scientist born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He took a chemistry degree at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1943, became interested in mathematics while serving in the United States Army in the Second World War, and earned his master's degree in 1949 and his doctorate in 1950 in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a dissertation on integral equations. After work on Project Whirlwind he taught at Purdue and then at Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he chaired mathematics and became the first head of computer science. He led the team behind Internal Translator, described by Donald Knuth as the first successful compiler, and took part in the development of ALGOL. In 1962 he became president of the Association for Computing Machinery and in 1966 he received the first Turing Award. He later held the Eugene Higgins chair of computer science at Yale, and his 1982 Epigrams on Programming remain widely quoted.