Posted: 30th August 2023

Each year, the Royal Society recognises exceptional research achievements by awarding a series of prestigious medals and prizes. Of the 25 awards for 2022-23, announced today, Emeritus Professor Sir Tony Hoare is one of four Oxford University researchers recognised for their outstanding contributions to science and medicine.

Sir Tony has received the Royal Medal (Physical) for ground-breaking contributions that have revolutionised the computer programming field.

Throughout his career, Sir Tony has made fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages. His achievements include developing one of the world’s most popular sorting algorithms, Quicksort; introducing ‘Hoare logic’, which allows software engineers to check that a program behaves as intended; and developing the formal language communicating sequential processes (CSP) to specify the interactions of concurrent processes.

Between 1977 and 1999, Sir Tony was a Professor of Computer Science in our department. During this time, he built up the Programming Research Group and founded the first computer science undergraduate degrees. On retiring from academia at Oxford, Sir Tony joined Microsoft Research as a principal researcher. His later interests included unifying the wide range of theories relating to different programming languages.

Amongst his numerous awards, Sir Tony was winner of the 1980 Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science. He was knighted in 2000 by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to education and Computer Science.