Liskov is one of the earliest women to have been granted a doctorate in computer science in the United States, and the second woman to receive the Turing award. She is currently an Institute Professor and Ford Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[2][3]
Early life and education
Liskov was born November 7, 1939, in Los Angeles, California,[4] the eldest of Jane (née Dickhoff) and Moses Huberman's four children.[5] She earned her bachelor's degree in mathematics with a minor in physics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. At Berkeley, she had only one other female classmate in her major.[6] She applied to graduate mathematics programs at Berkeley and Princeton. At the time Princeton was not accepting female students in mathematics.[7] She was accepted at Berkeley but instead moved to Boston and began working at Mitre Corporation, where she became interested in computers and programming. She worked at Mitre for one year before taking a programming job at Harvard working on language translation.[7]
She then decided to go back to school and applied again to Berkeley, but also to Stanford and Harvard. In March 1968 she became one of the first women in the United States to be awarded a Ph.D. from a computer science department when she was awarded her degree from Stanford University.[8][9][10] At Stanford, she worked with John McCarthy and was supported to work in artificial intelligence.[7] The topic of her Ph.D. thesis was a computer program to play chess endgames for which she developed the important killer heuristic.[11]
Career
After graduating from Stanford, Liskov returned to Mitre to work as research staff.[2]
In 2023 Liskov was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute for "seminal contributions to computer programming languages and methodology, enabling the implementation of reliable, reusable programs".[26]
Selected works
Liskov is the author of five books as of February 2023 and over one hundred technical papers.
Books
Liskov, Barbara; Atkinson, R.; Bloom, T.; Moss, E.; Schaffert, J. C.; Scheifler, R.; Snyder, A. (1981). CLU: Reference Manual. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. ISBN978-3-540-10836-8.
Castro, Miguel; Liskov, Barbara (1999-02-22). "Practical Byzantine fault tolerance". Proceedings of the Third Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation. OSDI '99. USA: USENIX Association: 173–186. ISBN978-1-880446-39-3.
In 1970, she married Nathan Liskov.[7] They have one son, Moses, who earned a PhD in computer science from MIT in 2004 and teaches computer science at the College of William and Mary.[2]
^ abcdGuttag, John (2005-01-01). The electron and the bit: electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1902–2002. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Dept. OCLC61332947.
^"Barbara Liskov". EngineerGirl. Retrieved 2007-09-06. Profile from the National Academies of Engineering.
^Huberman (Liskov), Barbara Jane (1968). A program to play chess end games(PDF) (Report). Technical Report CS 106, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project Memo AI-65. Stanford University Department of Computer Science. Archived from the original(PDF) on February 11, 2017.
^"Honorary Doctors". Zurich: ETH Computer Science. 22 March 2006. Archived from the original on 8 January 2013. Retrieved 29 October 2012. Barbara Liskov and Donald E. Knuth were awarded the title ETH Honorary Doctor on 19 November 2005.
John V. Guttag, Barbara Liskov, The Electron and The Bit: EECS at MIT, 1902–2002, Chapter VII: "Pioneering Women in EECS", pp. 225–239, 2003, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT