Professor Sir Charles Anthony Richard (Tony) Hoare 1934 - 2026

Professor Sir Charles Anthony Richard (Tony) Hoare, Honorary Fellow of the College died peacefully at home on 5 March 2026.

Tony, as he was universally known, was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford and the King’s School in Canterbury. He matriculated at Merton College in 1952 to read Classics and Philosophy.

Tony moved into academia in 1968 as Professor at Queen’s University Belfast, where he served until 1977 before taking up a chair at Oxford. At both institutions, he founded the first undergraduate and graduate degree programmes in computer science, as well as several joint degrees with the Mathematics and Engineering faculties. At Oxford, he also established a pioneering part-time MSc in Software Engineering designed for students working in industry.

Tony received numerous recognitions and accolades for his many contributions. After becoming the seventeenth Turing Award recipient in 1980, he was awarded the Harry H. Goode Memorial Award in 1981, elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1982, received the Faraday Medal in 1985, and the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award in 1990. In 2000, he was awarded both the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology (Information Science) and a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. He received the IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2011, the Royal Medal (Physical) from the Royal Society in 2023, and was inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2006 and of the ACM in 2020. He held 15 honorary doctorates and was a foreign member of both the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, as well as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

His Turing Award cited “fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages,” but that is only part of what he contributed during a career spanning six decades. Tony was feted for his creation of Quicksort, the development of Hoare Logic, the introduction of the monitor concept for operating systems, and many other fundamental contributions underlying modern computing.