1979 肯尼斯·艾佛森

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Kenneth E. Iverson

PHOTOGRAPHS
BIRTH:
December 17, 1920, Camrose, Alberta, Canada

DEATH:
October 19, 2004, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

EDUCATION:
B.A., mathematics and physics (Queen’s University, Kingston, 1950); M.A., mathematics (Harvard University, 1951); Ph.D., applied mathematics (Harvard University, 1954).

EXPERIENCE:
Instructor (applied mathematics), Harvard University (1954 – 1955); Assistant Professor, (applied mathematics), Harvard, University (1955 – 1960); International Business Machines (1960 – 1980); I. P. Sharp Associates (1980 – 1987).

HONORS AND AWARDS:
IBM Fellow (1971); Harry Goode Memorial Award (1975); ACM Turing Award (1979); IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award (1991); National Medal of Technology (1991); Honorary D.Sc., York University (1998)



KENNETH E. ("KEN") IVERSON DL Author Profile link
United States – 1979
CITATION
For his pioneering effort in programming languages and mathematical notation resulting in what the computing field now knows as APL, for his contributions to the implementation of interactive systems, to educational uses of APL, and to programming language theory and practice.

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Kenneth Eugene Iverson was born on December 17, 1920 on a farm near Camrose, Alberta, Canada, a small city about 100 km. southeast of the provincial capital of Edmonton. His parents, of Norwegian descent, had come to Alberta from North Dakota when they were children. He was educated in rural one-room schools until the end of 9th grade. He then stayed home to work on the farm because, he said, the only purpose of continuing his schooling would be to become a schoolteacher, and that was a profession he decidedly did not want. During the long winter months he studied calculus on his own. Years later he still recalled the joy of discovering how the “beautiful circular functions were finally united in a single family under the exponential.”

In 1942 Ken was drafted into the army, and the following year he transferred to the Royal Canadian Air Force and served as a flight engineer specializing in reconnaissance. During his military service he took eight correspondence courses offered by the Canadian Legion, nearly enough to complete high school. On his discharge from the services in 1946, with encouragement from both his counselors and fellow servicemen, he began his formal university education at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Ken earned a B.A. in mathematics and physics from Queen’s in 1950, and an M.A. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1951. He switched to the Department of Engineering and Applied Physics as a result of taking a course from computer pioneer Professor Howard Aiken. His Ph.D. thesis was supervised by Professor Aiken and the Nobel prize-winning economist Wassily Leontief. Iverson extended Leontief’s input-output model to handle capital goods. While doing the research, he realized the need to experiment with matrix methods using a computer, and he wrote a software package of matrix routines for the Harvard Mark I.

After completing his doctorate, Iverson joined the Harvard faculty to teach in Aiken’s new automatic data processing program, for one year as an Instructor, and for five years as an Assistant Professor. He became increasingly frustrated with the inadequacy of conventional mathematical notation for expressing algorithms. He began to invent his own notation, based on an extension of the higher dimensional arrays of tensor algebra and the concept of operators previously developed by the English physicist Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925).

In 1960 Ken joined the new Research Center of IBM in Yorktown Heights, New York, on the advice of Frederick Brooks, who had been one of his teaching fellows at Harvard and was now at IBM. The two collaborated on the continuing development of the new notation. In 1962 Ken published the now-classic book A Programming Language [1], the title of which gave the name APL to the notation which had up until then been informally called “Iverson’s notation”. In 1963 he and Fred Brooks published Automatic Data Processing [3] based on their lecture notes prepared for Aiken’s course at Harvard.

APL began as a notation for describing algorithms, and only later become a programming language. The first implementation of APL was written in 1965 in Fortran for an IBM 7090 computer, and was used in batch mode. In 1966 an interactive APL/360 system running on an IBM/360 Model 50 provided a regular service to users in the Yorktown Heights research center. APL became publicly available in 1968.

Ken continued to work on the development of APL throughout his tenure at IBM. He became an IBM Fellow in 1970. In 1980 he left IBM, and returned to Canada to work for I.P. Sharp Associates, which had established an APL-based time-sharing service widely used in Canada, the United States and Europe.

In 1987 he “retired from paid employment” and turned his full attention to the development of a more modern dialect of APL. APL was successfully used for commercial purposes, but Iverson wanted to develop a new simple executable notation more suitable for teaching, which would be available at low cost. Programs could be printed on standard printers, without the special characters that APL used. They could run on a wide variety of computing platforms, yet the language would have the simplicity and generality of APL. The first implementation of this language, called J, was announced at the APL90 Users’ Conference. (For examples of APL and J programs, see here.)

With collaborators, including his son Eric, Ken continued to work on the development of J, and he published many papers, monographs and books. On Saturday, October 16, 2004 Ken suffered a stroke while working on a J tutorial, and died three days later on October 19, at the age of 83.

Ken Iverson strongly believed in the power of appropriate notation as an aid to thought, especially when that notation can be interpreted by a computer. In the introduction to his Turing lecture he said, “The advantages of executability and universality found in programming languages can be effectively combined, in a single coherent language, with the advantages offered by mathematical notation.” He quoted from Alfred North Whitehead’s An Introduction to Mathematics first published in 1911:


“By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.”

Author: Keith Smillie



Kenneth E. Iverson

照片
出生地：加拿大
1920年12月17日，加拿大阿尔伯塔省坎罗斯市

逝世
2004年10月19日，多伦多，安大略省，加拿大

学历：数学和物理学学士（皇后大学
数学和物理学学士（金斯敦皇后大学，1950）；数学硕士（哈佛大学，1951）；应用数学博士（哈佛大学，1954）。

工作经验。
哈佛大学讲师（应用数学）（1954-1955）；哈佛大学助理教授（应用数学）（1955-1960）；国际商业机器公司（1960-1980）；I. P. Sharp公司（1980-1987）。

荣誉和奖项。
IBM研究员（1971年）；哈里-古德纪念奖（1975年）；ACM图灵奖（1979年）；IEEE计算机协会计算机先锋奖（1991年）；国家技术奖章（1991年）；约克大学荣誉理学博士（1998年）。



KENNETH E. ("KEN") IVERSON DL作者简介链接
美国 - 1979年
褒奖
由于他在编程语言和数学符号方面的开创性努力，导致现在计算机领域所知道的APL，由于他对互动系统的实现、APL的教育用途以及编程语言理论和实践的贡献。

简短注释的
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亚马逊图灵奖
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额外的
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肯尼斯-尤金-艾弗森于1920年12月17日出生在加拿大阿尔伯塔省卡姆罗斯附近的一个农场，这个小城市位于省会埃德蒙顿东南约100公里。他的父母是挪威后裔，在他们还是孩子的时候就从北达科他州来到阿尔伯塔。他在农村的单间学校接受教育，直到9年级结束。然后，他留在家里干农活，因为他说，继续上学的唯一目的是成为一名学校教师，而这是他坚决不想要的职业。在漫长的冬季，他自学了微积分。多年后，他仍然回忆起发现 "美丽的圆形函数最终在指数下统一为一个家族 "的喜悦。

1942年，肯被征召入伍，第二年他转入加拿大皇家空军，担任飞行工程师，专门从事侦察工作。在服兵役期间，他参加了加拿大军团提供的八个函授课程，几乎足以完成高中学业。1946年退役时，在辅导员和其他军人的鼓励下，他开始在安大略省金斯顿的皇后大学接受正式的大学教育。

1950年，肯在皇后大学获得数学和物理学学士学位，1951年在哈佛大学获得数学硕士学位。由于参加了计算机先驱霍华德-艾肯教授的课程，他转到了工程和应用物理系。他的博士论文由艾肯教授和诺贝尔经济学奖获得者瓦西里-列昂惕夫指导。艾弗森扩展了列昂惕夫的投入产出模型以处理资本货物。在研究过程中，他意识到需要用计算机来实验矩阵方法，于是他为哈佛大学的Mark I编写了一套矩阵程序的软件。

完成博士学位后，艾弗森加入了哈佛大学的教师队伍，在艾肯的新自动数据处理项目中任教，担任了一年的讲师，又担任了五年的助理教授。他对传统数学符号在表达算法方面的不足越来越感到沮丧。他开始发明自己的符号，基于张量代数的高维阵列的扩展和英国物理学家Oliver Heaviside（1850-1925）之前提出的运算符概念。

1960年，在弗雷德里克-布鲁克斯的建议下，肯加入了位于纽约约克敦高地的IBM新研究中心，后者曾是他在哈佛大学的教员之一，现在也在IBM。两人合作，继续开发新的符号。1962年，Ken出版了现在的经典书籍《程序设计语言》[1]，书名为APL，在那之前，这种符号一直被非正式地称为 "Iverson的符号"。1963年，他和Fred Brooks出版了《自动数据处理》[3]，该书基于他们为艾肯在哈佛的课程准备的讲义。

APL开始是描述算法的符号，后来才成为一种编程语言。APL的第一个实现是在1965年用Fortran编写的，用于IBM 7090计算机，并且是在批处理模式下使用。1966年，在IBM/360 Model 50上运行的交互式APL/360系统为Yorktown Heights研究中心的用户提供了常规服务。APL在1968年开始公开使用。

在IBM任职期间，Ken一直致力于APL的开发工作。他在1970年成为IBM研究员。1980年，他离开了IBM，回到加拿大为I.P. Sharp Associates工作，该公司建立了一个基于APL的时间共享服务，在加拿大、美国和欧洲广泛使用。

1987年，他 "从有偿工作中退休"，并将全部精力放在开发更现代的APL方言上。APL被成功地用于商业目的，但Iverson想开发一种新的简单的可执行符号，它更适合于教学，并能以低成本获得。程序可以在标准打印机上打印，没有APL使用的特殊字符。它们可以在各种计算平台上运行，但这种语言将具有APL的简单性和通用性。这种语言的第一个实现被称为J，是在APL90用户大会上宣布的。(关于APL和J程序的例子，请看这里）。

与包括他儿子Eric在内的合作者一起，Ken继续致力于J的开发，他发表了许多论文、专著和书籍。2004年10月16日星期六，Ken在编写J的教程时中风，三天后的10月19日去世，享年83岁。

肯-艾弗森坚信适当的符号作为思想的辅助工具的力量，特别是当这种符号可以被计算机解释的时候。在他的图灵演讲的导言中，他说："在编程语言中发现的可执行性和普遍性的优势，可以在一个单一的连贯的语言中与数学符号提供的优势有效地结合起来"。他引用了阿尔弗雷德-诺思-怀特海（Alfred North Whitehead）1911年首次出版的《数学导论》中的话。


"通过解除大脑所有不必要的工作，一个好的符号可以让它自由地集中在更高级的问题上，并在实际上提高了种族的精神力量。"

作者。基思-斯米利