Alan Perlis

Alan J. Perlis (April 1, 1922 - February 7, 1990) was a prominent U.S. computer scientist. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pa. 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 (known now as Carnegie Mellon University).During World War 2 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.

According to the citation, the 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.

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