Antony Hoare

In 1959, while studying machine translation of languages in Moscow, he invented the now well-known sorting algorithm Quicksort. He returned to England the following year and worked as a programmer for Elliott Brothers, a small British scientific computer manufacturer, designing the first commercial Algol 60 compiler. Hoare continued at Elliot Brothers as Chief Engineer, guiding a series of difficult projects until 1968 when he became Professor of Computing Science at Queen's University, Belfast.