Tony Hoare

Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare FRS FREng (born 11 January 1934), commonly known as Tony Hoare or C. A. R. Hoare, is a British computer scientist. He developed the sorting algorithm quicksort in 1959/1960. He also developed Hoare logic for verifying program correctness, and the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) to specify the interactions of concurrent processes (including the dining philosophers problem) and the inspiration for the occam programming language.

Biography

Born in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to British parents, Tony Hoare's father was a colonial civil servant and his mother was the daughter of a tea planter. Hoare was educated in England at the Dragon School in Oxford and the King's School in Canterbury. He then studied Classics and Philosophy ("Greats") at Merton College, Oxford. On graduating in 1956 he did 18 months National Service in the Royal Navy, where he learned Russian. He returned to Oxford University in 1958 to study for a postgraduate certificate in Statistics, and it was here that he began computer programming, having been taught Autocode on the Ferranti Mercury by Leslie Fox. He then went to Moscow State University as a British Council exchange student, where he studied machine translation under Andrey Kolmogorov.

Hoare

Hoare is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:

TS Mercury

The Training Ship Mercury, or the TS Mercury, was a shore-based naval training establishment at Hamble in Hampshire.

History

The TS Mercury was one of a number of similar, mostly static training ships located round the coasts of Britain and founded during the Victorian period to provide boy recruits for the Royal Navy. It was founded in 1885 as a charitable venture by Charles Arthur Richard Hoare, a partner in the banking firm of C. Hoare & Co, with the objective of rescuing poor boys of good character and training them for naval service. Initially the facility was based at Binstead on the Isle of Wight where the boys lived in the barque Illovo. Over the years the establishment was increasingly managed by Charles Hoare's mistress Beatrice Holme-Sumner, with whom he was to have a son (Robin Hoare) and a daughter. The entire establishment was moved from Binstead to Hamble near Southampton in 1892.

In June 1898, Beatrice Holme-Sumner married C. B. Fry, the great England cricketer and all-round sportsman, and in 1908, after the death of Hoare, Fry became the Mercury's Captain-Superintendent. In 1914, the former Royal Navy sloop HMS Gannet was loaned from the Admiralty for use mainly as a floating dormitory and the old Illovo was sold in 1916. In 1950 C.B. Fry retired and handed over command of TS Mercury to Commander Matthew Bradby RN Rtd.