Barbara Liskov

Barbara Liskov

Barbara Liskov (born November 7, 1939 as Barbara Jane Huberman) is an American computer scientist[2] who is an institute professor at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology and Ford Professor of Engineering in its School of Engineering's electrical engineering and computer sciencedepartment.[3]
Life and career
Liskov was born in 1939 California, the eldest of Jane (née Dickhoff) and Moses Huberman's four children.[4] She earned her BA in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. In 1968 Stanford Universitymade her one of the first women in the United States to be awarded aPh.D. from a computer science department.[5][6] The topic of her Ph.D. thesis was a computer program to play chess endgames.[7] In 1970, she married Nathan Liskov, and their son, Moses Liskov, was born in 1975.
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. WithJeannette 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 inByzantine fault tolerance and distributed computing.
Recognition and awards
Liskov is a member of the National Academy of Engineering 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.[8]
In 2004, Barbara Liskov won the John von Neumann Medal for "fundamental contributions to programming languages, programming methodology, and distributed systems".[9] On 19 November 2005, Barbara Liskov and Donald E. Knuth were awarded ETH Honorary Doctorates.[10]Liskov and Knuth were also featured in the ETH Zurich Distinguished Colloquium Series.[11]
Liskov received the 2008 Turing Award from the ACM, in March 2009,[12] for her work in the design of programming languages and software methodology that led to the development of object-oriented programming.[13] Specifically, Liskov developed two programming languages, CLU[14] in the 1970s and Argus[15] in the 1980s.[13] 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.
Barbara Liskov is the author of three books and over a hundred technical papers.