Barbara Liskov is among the 2012 inductees to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in recognition of her contributions to programming languages and system design.

Professor Liskov, who is a principal investigator at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), already has several other awards, including the Turing Award (2009) and the Katayanagi Prize in Computer Science (2011).

She received The Society of Women Engineers' Achievement Award in 1996,  the IEEE von Neumann medal in 2004 and in 2008, she was awarded the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award. She was also the first U.S. woman to receive a Ph.D. from a computer science department, which she earned at Stanford in 1968.

According to a statement on the National Inventors Hall of Fame website:

"MIT Institute Professor Liskov is considered an innovator in the design of computer programming languages, largely for helping to make computer programs more reliable, secure, and easy to use. Her innovations can be found within almost all modern programming languages."

Among her contributions is the Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP), formalized in 1994, which characterizes when it is safe to substitute an object of a subtype for an object of the parent type, thus preventing strange behaviors when the program is run.

More Information

Barbara Liskov - National Inventors Hall of Fame

Barbara Liskov's profile at CSAIL

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