Barbara Liskov

Barbara Liskov, (born Barbara Jane Huberman in 1939), is a computer scientist. She is currently the Ford Professor of Engineering in the MIT School of Engineering's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department and an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned her BA in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961, and became the first woman in the United States to be awarded a Ph.D. from a computer science department, in 1968 from Stanford University.^[2] The topic of her Ph.D. thesis was a computer program to play chess end games.^[3]

Liskov has led many significant projects, including the design and implementation of CLU, the first programming language to support data abstraction; Argus, the first high-level language to support implementation of distributed programs; and Thor, an object-oriented database system. With Jeannette Wing, she developed a particular definition of subtyping, commonly known as the Liskov substitution principle. She leads the Programming Methodology Group at MIT, with a current research focus in Byzantine Fault Tolerance and distributed computing.

Liskov is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In 2004 she won the John von Neumann Medal for "fundamental contributions to programming languages, programming methodology, and distributed systems". She is the author of three books and over a hundred technical papers.

Liskov received the 2008 Turing Award from the ACM^[4] for her work in the design of programming languages and software methodology that led to the development of object-oriented programming.^[5] Specifically, Liskov developed two programming languages, CLU in the 1970s and Argus in the 1980s.^[5]