W._Wallace_McDowell_Award

W. Wallace McDowell Award

W. Wallace McDowell Award

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The W. Wallace McDowell Award[1] is awarded by the IEEE Computer Society for outstanding theoretical, design, educational, practical, or related innovative contributions that fall within the scope of Computer Society interest. This is the highest technical award made solely by the IEEE Computer Society where selection of the awardee is based on the "highest level of technical accomplishment and achievement".[2] The IEEE Computer Society[3] (with over 85000 members from every field of computing[4]) is "dedicated to advancing the theory, practice, and application of computer and information processing technology." Another award considered to be the "most prestigious technical award in computing"[5] is the A. M. Turing Award awarded by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). This is popularly referred to as the "computer science's equivalent of the Nobel Prize".[6][7] The W. Wallace McDowell Award is sometimes popularly referred to as the "IT Nobel".[8][9]

Quick Facts Awarded for, Presented by ...

The award is named after W. Wallace McDowell who was director of engineering at IBM, during the development of the landmark product IBM 701. Mr. McDowell was responsible for the transition from electro-mechanical techniques to electronics, and the subsequent transition to solid state devices.[10]

The first recipient, in 1966, was Fernando J. Corbató who was a prominent American computer scientist, notable as a pioneer in the development of time-sharing operating systems, then of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The second recipient, in 1967, was John Backus who was awarded the Mcdowell Award for the development of FORTRAN and the syntactical forms incorporated in ALGOL.[1] John Backus was the developer of FORTRAN, for years one of the best known and most used programming systems in the world.[11]

W. Wallace McDowell Award recipients

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See also

Notes

  1. [1]
    "Past recipients for W. Wallace McDowell Award". IEEE Computer Society.
  2. [2]
    "IEEE COMPUTER SOCIETY POLICIES AND PROCEDURES MANUAL" (PDF). IEEE Computer Society.
  3. [3]
    "IEEE COMPUTER SOCIETY". IEEE Computer Society.
  4. [4]
    "IEEE COMPUTER SOCIETY 2009 Member Resource Guide" (PDF). IEEE Computer Society.
  5. [5]
    "ACM Awards: A.M Turing Award". ACM. Archived from the original on 2010-01-05. Retrieved 2009-12-28.
  6. [6]
    Chang, Kenneth (2009-11-15). "Amir Pnueli, Pioneer of Temporal Logic, Dies at 68". The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-05-12.
  7. [7]
    "FIRST WOMAN TO RECEIVE ACM TURING AWARD". ACM. Archived from the original on 2012-05-26. Retrieved 2007-07-02.
  8. [8]
    "Reddit discussion".
  9. [9]
    ""IT Nobel" Awarded to IBM Researcher". IBM Research Blog. 2012-03-28. Retrieved 2020-11-19.
  10. [10]
    "Tribute to W. Wallace McDowell". IEEE Computer Society.
  11. [11]
    "John Backus". IBM.

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