Tony Hoare, um rapaz simples, um homem do povo

Born in 1934, C. A. R. Hoare [...] graduated in Ancient Greats (Latin, Greek, Philosophy, and Ancient History) from Oxford University in 1956. While at Oxford, he also pursued extracurricular interests in the theory of probability and in mathematical logic[...]. Conscripted into the Royal Navy after his graduation, Hoare took the opportunity to study Russian, gaining an interpreter's qualification, and then spent a year at Moscow State University, attending lectures by the famous probability theorist A. N. Kolmogorov. At the end of his stay in Moscow, Hoare was asked to be an interpreter at an industrial exhibition. One of the exhibitors was the British firm Elliott Brothers, and Hoare was fascinated by the computer they had on display. [...]

In 1961 Hoare, now working for Elliott Brothers, attended a course on ALGOL 60 taught by [Peter] Naur, [Edsger] Dijkstra, and the British computer scientist Peter Landin. The course was a revelation. During it Hoare suddenly realized how to use ALGOL's elegant features to implement a new, fast sorting algorithm that he had thought up. Hoare's Quicksort, published in 1962, began to establish his reputation as a computer scientist.

Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk and Trust de Donald MacKenzie