Turing Award

Turing Award

The ACM A.M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community". It is stipulated that "The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field". The Turing Award is recognized as the "highest distinction in Computer science" and "Nobel Prize of computing".

The award is named after Alan Turing, mathematician and reader in mathematics at the University of Manchester. Turing is "frequently credited for being the Father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence". As of 2007, the award is accompanied by a prize of $250,000, with financial support provided by Intel and Google.

The first recipient, in 1966, was Alan Perlis, of Carnegie Mellon University. Frances E. Allen of IBM, in 2006, was the first female recipient in the award's forty year history. The 2008 award also went to a woman, Barbara Liskov.