Barbara Liskov

Barbara Liskov at OOPSLA 2009

Barbara Jane Huberman Liskov (born November 7, 1939 in Los Angeles ) is an American computer scientist . She works as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT . In 1968, she became the first woman in the United States to receive a Ph.D. from Stanford University. in computer science and in 2008 the second woman to receive the Turing Award (after Frances E. Allen ).

Live and act

Liskov received her bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1961 from the University of California, Berkeley . She then worked for a year at the think tank Miter Corporation and at Harvard University as a programmer, and finally at Stanford University as a research assistant in the field of AI , until she worked there in 1968 with A Program to Play Chess End Games at John McCarthy her computer science Ph.D. received. She went back to Miter until 1972, then to MIT, where she was a research assistant until 1976 and an associate professor until 1980 and has been a professor ever since.

Barbara Liskov led numerous important projects, including the design and implementation of the programming languages CLU and Argus as well as the object-oriented database management system Thor . Together with Jeannette Wing , she developed the Liskov substitution principle, which is important for object-oriented programming .

Liskov was on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council and the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Advisory Committee of the National Science Foundation , and advised Bolt Beranek and Newman , the Digital Equipment Corporation , Hewlett-Packard , the NCR Corporation , among others and Prime Computer .

Memberships

• Member of the American National Academy of Engineering
• Member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Fellow of the ACM

Awards

• 2004 John von Neumann Medal for " fundamental contributions to programming languages, programming methodology, and distributed systems " (translated as follows: " Fundamental contributions to programming languages, programming methodologies and distributed systems ")
• 2005 honorary doctorate from ETH Zurich
• 2008 Turing Award
• 2018 Computer Pioneer Award

Fonts (selection)

• with John Guttag : Abstraction and Specification in Program Development (=  MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science ). MIT Press , Cambridge 1986, ISBN 0-262-12112-3 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed November 7, 2019]).
• with John Guttag : Program Development in Java . Abstraction, Specification, and Object-Oriented Design. Addison-Wesley , Boston etc. 2001, ISBN 0-201-65768-6 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed November 7, 2019]).

Web links

Commons : Barbara Jane Liskov  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Barbara Liskovs site at MIT (English)
• Videos by and about Barbara Liskov in the AV portal of the Technical Information Library