December 3, 1924| |Died||March 17, 2007 |Alma mater||Columbia
University| |Notable awards||ACM Turing Award John Warner Backus
(December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer
scientist. He directed the team that invented the first widely
used high-level programming language (FORTRAN) and was the
inventor of the Backus-Naur form (BNF), the almost universally
used notation to define formal language syntax. He also did
research in function-level programming and helped to popularize
it. The IEEE awarded Backus the W.W. McDowell Award in 1967 for
the development of FORTRAN. He received the National Medal of
Science in 1975, and the 1977 ACM Turing Award “for profound,
influential, and lasting contributions to the design of
practical high-level programming systems, notably through his
work on FORTRAN, and for publication of formal procedures for
the specification of programming languages.” Life and career
Backus was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and grew up in
nearby Wilmington, Delaware. He stud