Alfred Aho

From Freepedia

Dr. Alfred V. Aho is a computer scientist. He is the Lawrence Gussman Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, where he is also vice-chair of undergraduate education for the computer science department. Before moving to Columbia he was Vice President of the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, where he is still a consultant.

He is most famous for his creation of the AWK programming language with Brian Kernighan and Peter J. Weinberger (the 'A' stands for "Aho"), and his co-authorship of Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools (the "Dragon book") with Ravi Sethi and Jeffrey Ullman. He is also a co-author (along with Ullman and John Hopcroft) of several widely-used textbooks on several areas of computer science, including the theory of computation.

Dr. Aho has received many prestigious honors, including the IEEE's John von Neumann Medal and membership in both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Waterloo and the University of Helsinki in Finland, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, ACM, and IEEE.