Studying physics at Purdue, John Reynolds audits the only computer class offered there in 1953. Half the classwork involves building a computer, the other half deals with programming. After reviewing the manual, the student realizes that computer programming is essentially a language.
"You have to figure out how to convert your understanding of the problem you're trying to solve into the minutely detailed program that will solve it," says Reynolds, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon since 1986.
Reynolds' fascination with the class prompted him to ask his professor, Alan Perlis, whether there was a viable future in the field. Perlis would one day cofound Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science, so it isn't hard to figure out what advice he gave Reynolds.
It is a good thing Perlis was supportive. Reynolds, along with Jean-Yves Girard, would go on to discover polymorphic lambda calculus, which remains one of the foundations for programming languages published today, including the systems of generics in Java and C#, two of the most widely used programming languages.
For his career contributions to the field, Reynolds, 75, recently was honored with the Lovelace Medal, given by BCS, The Charter Society for IT, which has more than 70,000 members from around the world. The medal is named after Ada Lovelace, a mathematician who was an inspiration to computer pioneer Charles Babbage.
"John's work and ideas underlie the daily work of thousands of developers who have probably never heard his name," says David Clarke, the society's CEO. "I hope this medal will go some way toward changing this."
-Jonathan Barnes (HS'93)
