Charles Antony Richard Hoare | Biography

Professor Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare, or Tony Hoare, has produced a large body of work relating to the definition and design of programming languages (Hoare's Logic), as well as several other innovations that allow computers to perform their tasks more efficiently.

Charles Antony Richard Hoare was born in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), in 1934 to British parents. He attended Oxford University for his studies, but these were interrupted by a period of National Service in the Royal Navy from 1956 to 1958. While in the Royal Navy Hoare studied Russian. In 1959 Hoare received his B.A. from Oxford University, which, due to the peculiarities of the Oxford University system, was converted to an M.A. the following year without Hoare having to undertake any graduate work. Hoare studied philosophy at Oxford, together with Latin and Greek. During his course of study Hoare became interested in the power of mathematical logic as an explanation of mathematical truth. This interest in logic led him towards mathematics and computing. In 1959 Hoare was awarded a certificate in statistics (which included some programming) from Merton College, Oxford University. In 1959 Hoare went to Moscow State University as a graduate student, where he studied the machine translation of languages and probability theory in the school of Kolmogorov. In the course of this studying Hoare discovered the Quicksort algorithm, which was used to efficiently look up words in a dictionary--this was the first efficient algorithm for sorting sequences.

In 1960 Hoare returned to England where from 1960 to 1968 he worked for Elliott Brothers, a small, scientific computer manufacturer based in London. He was initially employed as a programmer but he rapidly worked his way up through the system becoming a senior programmer, chief engineer, technical manager, and finally chief scientist. During his time at Elliott Brothers Hoare oversaw the design of the first commercial compiler for the Algol60 programming language. The compiler was actually designed using Algol60 itself although it subsequently used decimal machine code. Hoare's other work at Elliott Brothers included the failed development of an operating system and subsequent research on hardware and software architecture for computers. From 1968 to 1977 Hoare was at the University of Belfast as a professor of computing science. His research interests there centered around the differences between operating systems and compilers. He tried to apply advances in programming language and theory to solve the problems of concurrency. In 1969 Hoare was the first to apply techniques now known as axiomatic semantics (also called Hoare's Logic). This was a leap in the definition and design of programming languages. In 1977 Hoare became the James Martin Professor of Computing at the University of Oxford, England. Hoare's initial aim was to improve the size and strength of the Programming Research Group originally set up by Christopher Strachey. Once he was happy with the size of the Group Hoare was then able to devote his energies towards his research interests, which at this time chiefly covered software engineering and technically sound methods of specification, design, implementation, and maintenance of computer programs. A number of the discoveries he made during this time have been incorporated into various programming languages.

Throughout his career an interest in concurrency has been behind many of Hoare's research efforts. One of his major advances in this field has been a theory known as communicating sequential processes, which applies to systems where multiple processors can communicate with each other through wires. This theory has been applied in a number of applications. During his more academic work Hoare was always interested in industrial applications and he spent time as a consultant for various industries. In 1991, as well as his role as professor of computing, Hoare became director of the University Computing Laboratory. On retiring in 1999 Hoare moved from Oxford to Cambridge where he took a position as a senior researcher with Microsoft Research. Hoare's research interests tend towards the area of unification of theories of programming with a desire to strengthen links between research schools and with an ultimate goal of the results from many schools being unified and used for practical applications, particularly in engineering.

Hoare has been given many awards throughout his life, and some of the most important have been from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) including the Programming Systems and Languages Award in 1973 and the Turing Award in 1980. In 1982 Hoare was made a fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) and in 1999 he received a knighthood for services to computing science and he has several honorary doctorates from a number of universities.