Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, the two men who created the famous Diffie-Helman public-key exchange protocol, are conferred with the prestigious Turing Award. This Award is also known as Oscars of computer science and technology.
About the Award
- Turing Award was institutionalized in 1966.
- the Turing Award is an annual prize given out by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), an international learned society for computing, and the world’s largest scientific and educational computing society.
- Similar to the Nobel Prize, the Turing Award is given out each year to scientists who contributed to the field of computer science, regardless of whether it was a hardware, software, or theoretical innovation.
- The only condition is that “the contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field.”
- Besides the public distinction, the award also comes with a cash prize of $1 million.
- Most of the money is from Google, who announced back in November 2014 that it would be sponsoring the award. Prior to that, the Turing Award came with a $250,000 prize.
- Google’s donation brings the Turing Award at the same level as the Nobel Prize’s cash reward.
Previous Winners of the Award
Past Turing Award winners include Marvin Minsky (so-called father of Artificial Intelligence), Edsger W. Dijkstra (creator of ALGOL, one of the first high-level programming languages), Alan Kay (for pioneering the ideas behind object-oriented programming languages), Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn (creators of the TCP/IP protocols), and Charles P. Thacker (the man behind Xerox Alto, the first modern PC).
