Jewish Recipients of the ACM Turing Award

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Listed below are recipients of the Association for Computing Machinery's A.M. Turing Award who were, or are, Jewish (or of partial Jewish descent, as noted). The Turing Award is generally considered to be the most prestigious in the field of computer science.

Alan Perlis (1966)
Marvin Minsky (1969)
John McCarthy¹ (1971)
Herbert Simon² (1975)
Michael Rabin (1976)
Richard Karp (1985)
Robert Tarjan ³ (1986)
William Kahan (1989)
Edward Feigenbaum (1994)
Manuel Blum (1995)
Amir Pnueli (1996)
Adi Shamir (2002)
Leonard Adleman (2002)
Vinton Cerf⁴ (2004)
Robert Kahn (2004)
Barbara Liskov (2008)
Leslie Valiant (2010)
Judea Pearl (2011)
Shafi Goldwasser (2012)
Leslie Lamport (2013)
Martin Hellman (2015)
Yoshua Bengio (2018)
Jeffrey Ullman (2020)
Avi Wigderson (2023)

NOTES
1. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father. See, e.g., The OMNI Interviews, edited by Pamela Weintraub (Ticknor&Fields, New York, 1984, p. 260); also Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists, by Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazere (Copernicus/Springer-Verlag, New York, 1995, p. 23).
2. Jewish father, mother of partial Jewish ancestry; see Models of My Life, by Herbert A. Simon (BasicBooks, New York, 1991, pp. 3, 17, 112, 262).
3. Son of Dr. George Tarjan, 112th President of the American Psychiatric Association, who "was raised in an intellectual, liberal Jewish family" in Hungary, where his parents and younger brother Endre perished in the Holocaust; see obituary in the American Journal of Psychiatry (150:5, May 1993, pp. 691-694).
4. Jewish, or mostly Jewish, father, non-Jewish mother. At least three of Vinton Cerf's four paternal great grandparents were Jews. Bennett Cerf, the (Jewish) co-founder of publishing giant Random House, was a cousin.

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