Every time you exchange e-mail with a friend, check your bank statement online, or run a Google search, you are benefiting from MIT Institute Professor Barbara Liskov’s research. Her pioneering contributions to software design earned Liskov the 2008 Turing Award, one of the highest honors in science and engineering.
Liskov is only the second woman to receive the prize, which carries a $250,000 purse and is often described as the “Nobel Prize of computing.” The Association for Computing Machinery, which awards the honor each year, credited her with “foundational innovations” in the field of computer science and lauded her for helping make software more reliable, consistent, and resistant to errors and hacking.
Liskov’s early innovations underlie every important programming language since 1975, including Ada, C++, Java, and C#. She not only invented data abstraction, a valuable technique that helps programmers focus on conceptual goals instead of the low-level complexities of code, but was a leader in demonstrating how it could be used to make software easier to construct, modify, and maintain. Many of these ideas were derived from her experience at the defense contractor Mitre in building the Venus operating system, a small, interactive time-sharing system.
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