Sir Tim Berners-Lee awarded the ACM A. M. Turing Award for 2016

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, professor at MIT and the University of Oxford has been awarded the 2016 ACM A. M. Turing Award for the year 2016. The citation for Sir Berners-Lee reads:

For inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale.

The Turing Award comes with a prize money of $1 million and will be awarded on June 24th at San Francisco to Sir Berners-Lee. The award is named after the British mathematician and computer scientist Alan M. Turing who pioneered the mathematical foundations and limits of computing. The award is given by the Association for Computing Machinery and is supported by Google, Inc. Over the years, the award has grown in prestige not only because of the prize money, but also because of its’ previous recipients. It is very often referred to as the ‘Nobel Prize in Computing’.

Sir Berners-Lee conceived of the World Wide Web when he was working at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research, Geneva, Switzerland) as a way to allow scientists around the world to share their work over the internet. He also created the first browser which was open-source, and is often thought to be the reason for the world wide web’s rapid growth. Since then, Sir Berners-Lee has gone on to either found or work at several organizations and is also a member of the Internet Hall of Fame.

The full press release from ACM can be read here.