Tony Hoare

Sir Tony Hoare
FRS FREng
Sir Tony Hoare FRS FREng
	Tony Hoare in 2011
Born	Charles Antony Richard Hoare; 11 January 1934; Colombo, British Ceylon
Died	5 March 2026 (aged 92); Cambridge, England
Education	Merton College, Oxford (BA, PgDip); Moscow State University;
Known for	Quicksort; Quickselect; Hoare logic; Null reference; Communicating sequential processes; Structured programming; ALGOL;
Spouse	Jill Pym
Children	3
Awards	Turing Award (1980); Harry H. Goode Memorial Award (1981); Faraday Medal (1985); Computer Pioneer Award (1990); Kyoto Prize (2000); IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2011); Royal Medal (2023)
	Scientific career
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	Elliott Brothers; Queen's University Belfast; University of Oxford; Moscow State University; Microsoft Research;
Doctoral students	Cliff Jones; Bill Roscoe; Augusto Sampaio;
Website	www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/tony.hoare

Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (/hɔːr/ HOR; 11 January 1934 – 5 March 2026), also known as C. A. R. Hoare, was a British computer scientist who made foundational contributions to programming languages, algorithms, operating systems, formal verification, and concurrent computing. His work earned him the 1980 ACM Turing Award, usually regarded as the highest distinction in computer science.

Hoare developed the sorting algorithm quicksort in 1959–1960. He developed Hoare logic, an axiomatic basis for verifying program correctness. In the semantics of concurrency, he introduced the formal language communicating sequential processes (CSP) to specify the interactions of concurrent processes, and along with Edsger Dijkstra, formulated the dining philosophers problem. From 1977 on, he held positions at the University of Oxford as well as at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.