Alan Perlis

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Alan Jay Perlis (April 1, 1922 - February 7, 1990) was a prominent U.S. computer scientist. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was the first recipient of the Turing Award, in 1966.

In 1943, he received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). During World War II, he served in the US Army, where he became interested in mathematics. At MIT, he earned both a master's degree in mathematics in 1949 and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1950. His dissertation was titled "On Integral Equations, Their Solution by Iteration and Analytic Continuation".

According to the citation, his Turing Award was for his influence in the area of advanced programming techniques and compiler construction. This is a reference to the work he had done as a member of the team that developed the ALGOL programming language.

He was the first head of the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University.

Alan Perlis was a professor of Computer Science at Yale University.

In 1982, he wrote an article, Epigrams on Programming, for ACM's SIGPLAN journal, describing in one-sentence distillations many of the things he had learned about programming over his career. The epigrams have been widely quoted.

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