The ACM A.M. Turing Award is the most prestigious technical award given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The ACM describes it as the award given for major contributions of lasting importance to computing, and its own award site notes that it is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize in Computing.” It is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundations of computing.
The award has been presented annually since 1966. The first recipient was Alan Perlis, recognized for his influence in advanced programming techniques and compiler construction. In the decades since, the roster of winners has tracked the field’s central achievements, from the people who built the first operating systems and programming languages to those who founded theoretical computer science.
Since 2014 the award has carried a prize of US one million dollars, with financial support provided by Google. The ACM’s own materials on the award present this funding arrangement and prize figure as part of the award’s current standing.
Several figures in the theory of computation that this library covers are Turing Award laureates, including Stephen Cook, recognized for his work founding the theory of NP-completeness, and Richard Karp, recognized for contributions to the theory of algorithms. The award thus serves as one of the clearest historical markers of which contributions the computing community has judged most foundational.