Andrey Ershov

Academician Andrey Petrovych Ershov (Russian: Андре́й Петро́вич Ершо́в; 19 April 1931, Moscow – 8 December 1988, Moscow) was a Soviet computer scientist, notable as a pioneer in systems programming and programming language research.

Donald Knuth considers him to be the inventor of the idea of hashing. He also created one of the first algorithms for compiling arithmetic expressions.

He was responsible for the languages ALPHA and Rapira, AIST-0 the first Soviet time-sharing system, electronic publishing system RUBIN, and MRAMOR, a multiprocessing workstation. He also was the iniitiator of developing the Computer Bank of the Russian Language (Машинный Фонд Русского Языка), the Soviet project for creating a large representative Russian corpus, a project in the 1980s comparable to the Bank of English and British National Corpus. The Russian National Corpus created by the Russian Academy of Sciences in the 2000s is a successor of Ershov's project.

From 1959 he worked at the Siberian Division of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and helped found both the Novosibirsk Computer Center and the Siberian School of Computer Science.

He received the Academician A. N. Krylov Prize from the Academy of Sciences, the first programmer to be so recognized. In 1974 he was made a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, and in 1981 he received the Silver Core Award of the IFIP.

To computer science community he is mostly known for his speech "Aesthetics and the Human Factor in Programming" presented at the dinner at the AFIPS Spring Joint Computer Conference in 1972 and, due to its importance, republished as an article by the Communications of the ACM.

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