Computer science pioneer Alfred Aho discusses computational thinking

Alfred Aho delivered a Dean’s Lecture on March 21, outlining how computational thinking is an indispensable skill for virtually anyone living in the information age. Aho’s talk was a joint lecture with the Qatar Computer Research Institute.

Aho, who is the Lawrence Gussman Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, is a pioneer of computer science. He is a co-author of the best-selling compiler textbook, Principles of Compiler Design. This first edition became known as the “green dragon book,” and was published in 1977. The subsequent editions have included the “red dragon book” and finally the “purple dragon book” in 2007.

After receiving his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University, Aho joined the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, which is the lab that invented Unix, C, and C++. He is well known for his many papers and books on algorithms and data structures, programming languages, compilers, and the foundations of computer science. He is the "A" in AWK, a widely-used text-processing language.