The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to Computer Science (CS).

It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in the field of computer science and is often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing".

1960s

  • 1966. Alan Perlis. Compiler construction; ALGOL influence.
  • 1967. Maurice Wilkes. First stored-program computer (EDSAC).
  • 1968. Richard Hamming. Error-correcting codes.
  • 1969. Marvin Minsky. Foundations of AI.

1970-79

  • 1970. James Wilkinson. Numerical analysis.
  • 1971. John McCarthy. AI; Lisp.
  • 1972. Edsger Dijkstra. Structured programming.
  • 1973. Charles Bachman. Database systems.
  • 1974. Donald Knuth. Algorithms & analysis.
  • 1975. Allen Newell & Herbert Simon. AI and cognitive science.
  • 1976. Michael Rabin & Dana Scott. Automata theory.
  • 1977. John Backus. FORTRAN; programming languages.
  • 1978. Robert Floyd. Program verification; algorithms.
  • 1979. Kenneth Iverson. APL language.

1980-89

  • 1980. Tony Hoare. Quicksort; Hoare logic.
  • 1981. Edgar Codd. Relational databases.
  • 1982. Stephen Cook. NP-completeness theory.
  • 1983. Ken Thompson & Dennis Ritchie. UNIX; C language.
  • 1984. Niklaus Wirth. Pascal; language design.
  • 1985. Richard Karp. Algorithm theory.
  • 1986. John Hopcroft & Robert Tarjan. Graph algorithms.
  • 1987. John Cocke. RISC architecture.
  • 1988. Ivan Sutherland. Computer graphics.
  • 1989. William Kahan. Floating-point arithmetic.

1990-99

  • 1990. Fernando Corbató. Time-sharing systems.
  • 1991. Robin Milner. Type theory; concurrency.
  • 1992. Butler Lampson. Distributed systems.
  • 1993. Juris Hartmanis & Richard Stearns. Complexity theory.
  • 1994. Edward Feigenbaum & Raj Reddy. Expert systems / AI.
  • 1995. Manuel Blum. Computational complexity.
  • 1996. Amir Pnueli. Temporal logic in verification.
  • 1997. Douglas Engelbart. Interactive computing (mouse, UI).
  • 1998. Jim Gray. Database & transaction systems.
  • 1999. Fred Brooks. Software engineering; IBM System/360.

2000-09

  • 2000. Andrew Yao. Computational complexity.
  • 2001. Ole-Johan Dahl & Kristen Nygaard. Object-oriented programming.
  • 2002. Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, Leonard Adleman. RSA cryptography.
  • 2003. Alan Kay. Object-oriented computing; Smalltalk.
  • 2004. Vint Cerf & Bob Kahn. Internet (TCP/IP).
  • 2005. Peter Naur. Programming languages; ALGOL.
  • 2006. Frances Allen. Compiler optimization.
  • 2007. Edmund Clarke, Allen Emerson, Joseph Sifakis. Model checking.
  • 2008. Barbara Liskov. Abstraction; programming languages.
  • 2009. Charles Thacker. Personal computing (Xerox Alto).

2010-19

  • 2010. Leslie Valiant. Computational learning theory.
  • 2011. Judea Pearl. Probabilistic reasoning (Bayesian networks).
  • 2012. Shafi Goldwasser & Silvio Micali. Modern cryptography.
  • 2013. Leslie Lamport. Distributed systems.
  • 2014. Michael Stonebraker. Databases.
  • 2015. Whitfield Diffie & Martin Hellman. Public-key cryptography.
  • 2016. Tim Berners-Lee. World Wide Web.
  • 2017. John Hennessy & David Patterson. Computer architecture.
  • 2018. Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun. Deep learning.
  • 2019. Edwin Catmull & Pat Hanrahan. Computer graphics.

2020-25

  • 2020. Alfred Aho & Jeffrey Ullman. Compilers & algorithms.
  • 2021. Jack Dongarra. Numerical computing software.
  • 2022. Bob Metcalfe. Ethernet networking.
  • 2023. Avi Wigderson. Computational complexity theory.
  • 2024. Andrew Barto & Richard Sutton. Reinforcement learning.
  • 2025. Charles Bennett & Gilles Brassard. Quantum information & cryptography.

Source: Orkhan Alishov's notes