Andrey Petrovich Yershov (; 19 April 1931,

Moscow Moscow is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Russia by population, largest city of Russia, standing on the Moskva (river), Moskva River in Central Russia. It has a population estimated at over 13 million residents with ...

– 8 December 1988, Moscow) was a

Soviet The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

, notable as a pioneer in

systems programming Systems programming, or system programming, is the activity of programming computer system software. The primary distinguishing characteristic of systems programming when compared to application programming is that application programming aims t ...

and

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

research.

Donald Knuth Donald Ervin Knuth ( ; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of comp ...

considers him to have independently co-discovered the idea of hashing with

linear probing Linear probing is a scheme in computer programming for resolving hash collision, collisions in hash tables, data structures for maintaining a collection of Attribute–value pair, key–value pairs and looking up the value associated with a giv ...

. He also created one of the first algorithms for compiling arithmetic expressions. He was responsible for the languages ''ALPHA'' and '' Rapira'', the first Soviet

time-sharing In computing, time-sharing is the Concurrency (computer science), concurrent sharing of a computing resource among many tasks or users by giving each Process (computing), task or User (computing), user a small slice of CPU time, processing time. ...

system ''AIST-0'', electronic publishing system ''RUBIN'', and a

multiprocessing Multiprocessing (MP) is the use of two or more central processing units (CPUs) within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor or the ability to allocate tasks between them. The ...

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or computational science, scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating syste ...

''MRAMOR''. He also was the initiator of developing the ''Computer Bank of the Russian Language'' ( Машинный Фонд Русского Языка), the Soviet project for creating a large representative Russian

corpus Corpus (plural ''corpora'') is Latin for "body". It may refer to: Linguistics * Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts * Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files * Corpus linguistics, a branch of ...

, a project in the 1980s comparable to the Bank of English and

British National Corpus The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100-million-word text corpus of samples of written and spoken English from a wide range of sources. The corpus covers British English of the late 20th century from a wide variety of genres, with the intention ...

. The Russian National Corpus created by the

Russian Academy of Sciences The Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS; ''Rossíyskaya akadémiya naúk'') consists of the national academy of Russia; a network of scientific research institutes from across the Russian Federation; and additional scientific and social units such ...

in the 2000s is a successor of Yershov's project. From 1959, he worked at the Siberian Division of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, and helped found both the ''Novosibirsk Computer Center'' and the ''Siberian School of Computer Science''. He received the Academician A. N. Krylov Prize from the Academy of Sciences, the first programmer to be so recognized. In 1974, he was made a Distinguished Fellow of the

British Computer Society image:Maurice Vincent Wilkes 1980 (3).jpg, Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957. The British Computer Society (BCS), branded BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, since 2009, is a professional body and a learned ...

. He was involved with developing

international standard An international standard is a technical standard developed by one or more international standards organizations. International standards are available for consideration and use worldwide. The most prominent such organization is the International O ...

s in programming and informatics, as a member of the

International Federation for Information Processing The International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) is a global organisation for researchers and professionals working in the field of computing to conduct research, develop standards and promote information sharing. Established in 19 ...

(IFIP) IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi, which specified, maintains, and supports the languages

ALGOL 60 ALGOL 60 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1960'') is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages. It followed on from ALGOL 58 which had introduced code blocks and the begin and end pairs for delimiting them, representing a ...

and

ALGOL 68 ALGOL 68 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1968'') is an imperative programming language member of the ALGOL family that was conceived as a successor to the ALGOL 60 language, designed with the goal of a much wider scope of application and ...

. In 1981, he received the IFIP's ''Silver Core Award''. To the computer science community, he is mostly known for his speech ''Aesthetics and the Human Factor in Programming'' presented at the dinner at the AFIPS Spring Joint Computer Conference in 1972 and, due to its importance, republished as an article by the

Communications of the ACM ''Communications of the ACM'' (''CACM'') is the monthly journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). History It was established in 1958, with Saul Rosen as its first managing editor. It is sent to all ACM members. Articles are i ...

References

Books

* ''Programming Programme for the BESM Computer'', Pergamon Press, London, 1959. Translated from the Russian original: ', 1958.

External links

Academician A. Yershov's archive
including documents and photographs

Biography of Academician A.P. Yershov
at the archive
Computer Fund of Russian Language

PSI
International Andrey Yershov Memorial Conference (Novosibirsk, Russia) {{DEFAULTSORT:Yershov, Andrey 1931 births 1988 deaths Fellows of the British Computer Society Full Members of the USSR Academy of Sciences Moscow State University alumni Academic staff of Novosibirsk State University Recipients of the Order of the Red Banner of Labour Computer programmers Computer systems researchers Programming language designers Programming language researchers Russian computer scientists Russian inventors Soviet computer scientists Soviet inventors Scientists from Moscow Scientists from Novosibirsk Burials at Yuzhnoye Cemetery (Novosibirsk)

See also

References

Books

External links