Skip to content
Trackfame
Join
Tony Hoare
Science Technology

Tony Hoare

British computer scientist who invented Quicksort and Hoare logic

11 January 1934 – 5 March 2026 United Kingdom Verified by our editors
Follow 0 followers Correction Cite
Lived
92 yrs
1934 – 2026
Works listed
3
Algorithm, Paper
Honours
4
Most recent 2000
Profile views
4
0 followers

Sir Tony Hoare was a British computer scientist who invented Quicksort, one of the most widely used sorting algorithms, and Hoare logic for proving programs correct. He also created Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) for concurrent programs and received the Turing Award in 1980.

Biography

Early life

Hoare was born in Colombo to British parents and studied classics and philosophy at Merton College, Oxford. During national service he learned Russian, and in 1959 he studied machine translation at Moscow State University.

Quicksort

In Moscow, while working on sorting words for a translation program, he devised Quicksort, published in 1961. It sorts by repeatedly splitting a list around a pivot and remains one of the fastest general-purpose sorting methods.

Making programs trustworthy

After working at Elliott Brothers, where he led an ALGOL 60 compiler project, he became a professor at Queen’s University Belfast and then Oxford. His 1969 paper introduced Hoare logic for reasoning about program correctness, and his 1978 CSP model shaped concurrent programming languages such as occam and Go.

The billion-dollar mistake

Hoare introduced the null reference in ALGOL W in 1965 and later called it his “billion-dollar mistake”. He was knighted in 2000 and worked at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. He died on 5 March 2026, aged 92.

Timeline

  1. 1934

    Born in Colombo, British Ceylon (now Sri Lanka)

  2. 1959

    Invents Quicksort in Moscow

  3. 1961

    Quicksort published

  4. 1968

    Professor at Queen’s University Belfast

  5. 1969

    Hoare logic paper

  6. 1977

    Professor at Oxford

  7. 1978

    CSP paper

  8. 1980

    Turing Award

  9. 2000

    Knighted; Kyoto Prize

  10. 2026

    Died, aged 92

Notable works

  • 1961

    Quicksort Algorithm

  • 1969

    An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming Paper

  • 1985

    Communicating Sequential Processes Book

Awards and honours

  • Turing Award

    1980

  • Fellow of the Royal Society

    1982

  • Kyoto Prize

    2000

  • Knight Bachelor

    2000

Did you know?

  1. 1

    He first studied Latin, Greek and philosophy, not science.

  2. 2

    He called null references his “billion-dollar mistake” in a 2009 talk.

  3. 3

    The Go language’s channels draw on his CSP ideas.

Connections

Related people

Also born on 11 January

Frequently asked

Who is Tony Hoare?

Sir Tony Hoare was a British computer scientist who invented Quicksort, one of the most widely used sorting algorithms, and Hoare logic for proving programs correct. He also created Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) for concurrent programs and received the Turing Award in 1980.

When did Tony Hoare die?

Tony Hoare died on 5 March 2026 at the age of 92.

Where is Tony Hoare from?

Tony Hoare was born in Colombo, British Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

What is Tony Hoare known for?

Tony Hoare is best known for Quicksort; Hoare logic; Communicating Sequential Processes; Turing Award 1980.

What awards has Tony Hoare received?

Notable honours include Turing Award (1980), Fellow of the Royal Society (1982), Kyoto Prize (2000), Knight Bachelor (2000).

References

  1. Tony Hoare — Wikipedia. Wikipedia. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
  2. Tony Hoare — Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
  3. Official website. www.cs.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
  4. Tony Hoare (Q92602) — structured data. Wikidata. Retrieved 4 November 2026.

Includes material from the Wikipedia article “Tony Hoare”, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. That text is available under the same licence. Learn more

External links

Official website Website Wikipedia
Filed under AlgorithmsTuring AwardUniversity of Oxford Computer ScientistProfessor

About this profile

Cite this page

“Tony Hoare.” TrackFame, last updated 5 November 2026. https://trackfame.com/person/tony-hoare

Discussion 0

Sign in or create an account to join the discussion.

No comments yet — be the first.

More in Science

See all
Margaret Hamilton Science

Margaret Hamilton

MIT engineer who led the software for the Apollo Moon landings and coined “software engineering”

1936 – 2026

Marvin Minsky Science

Marvin Minsky

Co-founder of MIT’s artificial intelligence laboratory and a founding father of AI

1927 – 2016

Michael Faraday Science

Michael Faraday

Self-taught scientist who discovered electromagnetic induction

1791 – 1867

Nikola Tesla Science

Nikola Tesla

Serbian-American inventor of the alternating-current induction motor

1856 – 1943

Yann LeCun Science

Yann LeCun

French-American AI pioneer who invented convolutional neural networks

Born 1959

Peter Norvig Science

Peter Norvig

Google’s former director of research and co-author of the leading AI textbook

Born 1956