Barbara Liskov

Barbara Liskov (born November 7, 1939 as Barbara Jane Huberman) is an American computer scientist[2] who is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ford Professor of Engineering in its School of Engineering's electrical engineering and computer science department.[3] She was one of the first women to be granted a doctorate in computer science in the United States and is a Turing Award winner who developed the Liskov substitution principle.

Barbara Liskov
Liskov in 2010.
Born
Barbara Jane Huberman

(1939-11-07) November 7, 1939
Los Angeles, California
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater
Known for
Spouse(s)Nathan Liskov (1970–)
Children1
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
InstitutionsMassachusetts Institute of Technology
ThesisA Program to Play Chess End Games (1968)
Doctoral advisorJohn McCarthy[1]
Doctoral studentsMaurice Herlihy, J. Eliot Moss, Sanjay Ghemawat

Early life and education

Liskov was born November 7, 1939 in Los Angeles, California,[4] to a Jewish family, the eldest of Jane (née Dickhoff) and Moses Huberman's four children.[5] She earned her BA in mathematics with a minor in physics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. In her classes she had one other female classmate, the rest were male.[6] After she graduated she applied to graduate mathematics programs at Berkeley and Princeton. At the time Princeton was not accepting female students in mathematics.[7] She was accepted at Berkeley but instead of studying she moved to Boston and began working at Mitre Corporation. It was there that she became interested in computers and programming. She worked at Mitre for one year before taking a programming job at Harvard where she worked on language translation.[7]

She then decided to go back to school and applied again to Berkeley, but also to Stanford and Harvard. In 1968 she became one of the first women in the United States to be awarded a Ph.D from a computer science department when she was awarded her degree from Stanford University.[8][9] At Stanford she worked with John McCarthy and was supported to work in artificial intelligence.[7] The topic of her Ph.D. thesis was a computer program to play chess endgames.[10]

Career

After graduating from Stanford, Liskov returned to Mitre to work as research staff.[2]

Liskov has led many significant projects, including the Venus operating system, a small, low-cost and interactive timesharing system; the design and implementation of CLU; Argus, the first high-level language to support implementation of distributed programs and to demonstrate the technique of promise pipelining; and Thor, an object-oriented database system. With Jeannette Wing, she developed a particular definition of subtyping, commonly known as the Liskov substitution principle. She leads the Programming Methodology Group at MIT, with a current research focus in Byzantine fault tolerance and distributed computing.[3]

Recognition and awards

Liskov is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In 2002, she was recognized as one of the top women faculty members at MIT, and among the top 50 faculty members in the sciences in the U.S.[11] In 2002, Discover magazine recognized Liskov as one of the 50 most important women in science.[12]

In 2004, Barbara Liskov won the John von Neumann Medal for "fundamental contributions to programming languages, programming methodology, and distributed systems".[13] On 19 November 2005, Barbara Liskov and Donald E. Knuth were awarded ETH Honorary Doctorates.[14] Liskov and Knuth were also featured in the ETH Zurich Distinguished Colloquium Series.[15] In 2018 she was awarded as Doctor Honoris Causa by Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.[16]

Liskov received the 2008 Turing Award from the ACM, in March 2009,[17] for her work in the design of programming languages and software methodology that led to the development of object-oriented programming.[18] Specifically, Liskov developed two programming languages, CLU[19] in the 1970s and Argus[20] in the 1980s.[18] The ACM cited her contributions to the practical and theoretical foundations of "programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing".[21] In 2012 she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.[22]

Barbara Liskov is the author of three books and over one hundred technical papers.

Personal life

In 1970, she married Nathan Liskov.[7]

See also

References
  1. Barbara Liskov at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. Barbara Liskov – A.M. Turing Award Winner
  3. Barbara Liskov, Programming Methodology Group, MIT.
  4. Karagianis, Liz (Fall 2009). "Top Prize". MIT Spectrum. Retrieved 10 July 2016.
  5. "Jane Siegel: Obituary". San Francisco Chronicle (via Legacy.com). January 24, 2010. Retrieved 2014-11-18.
  6. D'Agostino, Susan. "The Architect of Modern Algorithms". Quanta Magazine. Retrieved 2020-10-21.
  7. Guttag, John (2005-01-01). The electron and the bit: electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1902–2002. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Dept. OCLC 61332947.
  8. "Barbara Liskov". EngineerGirl. Retrieved 2007-09-06. Profile from the National Academies of Engineering.
  9. "UW-Madison Computer Science Ph.D.s Awarded, May 1965 – August 1970". Retrieved 2010-11-08. PhDs granted at UW-Madison Computer Sciences Department.
  10. Huberman (Liskov), Barbara Jane (1968). A program to play chess end games (PDF) (Report). Technical Report CS 106, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project Memo AI-65. Stanford University Department of Computer Science.
  11. "MIT's magnificent seven: Women faculty members cited as top scientists". MIT News Office. Cambridge, MA. 5 Nov 2002. Retrieved 29 October 2012.
  12. Svitil, Kathy (13 November 2002). "The 50 Most Important Women in Science". Discover. Retrieved 1 May 2019.
  13. IEEE John von Neumann Medal Recipients from the website of IEEE
  14. "Honorary Doctors". Zurich: ETH Computer Science. 22 March 2006. Archived from the original on 8 January 2013. Retrieved 29 October 2012. Barbara Liskov and Donald E. Knuth were awarded the title ETH Honorary Doctor on 19 November 2005.
  15. "Distinguished Lecturers Barbara Liskov and Donald E. Knuth". Zurich: ETH Computer Science. January 2006. Archived from the original on 8 January 2013. Retrieved 29 October 2012.
  16. elEconomista.es. "Barbara Liskov, nueva doctora honoris causa por la UPM - elEconomista.es" (in Spanish). Retrieved 2018-06-11.
  17. Weisman, Robert (March 10, 2009). "Top prize in computing goes to MIT professor". The Boston Globe.
  18. Barbara Liskov Wins Turing Award | March 10, 2009 from the Dr. Dobb's Journal website
  19. Liskov, B.; Snyder, A.; Atkinson, R.; Schaffert, C. (August 1977). "Abstraction mechanisms in CLU". Communications of the ACM. 20 (8): 564–576. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.112.656. doi:10.1145/359763.359789. S2CID 17343380.
  20. Liskov, B. (March 1988). "Distributed programming in Argus". Comm. ACM. 31 (3): 300–312. doi:10.1145/42392.42399. S2CID 16233001.
  21. "ACM Names Barbara Liskov Recipient of the 2008 ACM A.M. Turing Award". Association for Computing Machinery. Archived from the original on 2012-07-16. Retrieved 2009-03-10.
  22. "Spotlight | National Inventors Hall of Fame". Invent.org. 2013-11-21. Archived from the original on 2016-08-14. Retrieved 2016-05-31.
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