Liskov is one of the earliest women to have been granted a doctorate in computer science in the United States, and the second woman to receive the Turing award. She is currently anInstitute Professor and Ford Professor of Engineering at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology.[2][3]
Liskov was born November 7, 1939, in Los Angeles, California,[4] the eldest of Jane (née Dickhoff) and Moses Huberman's four children.[5] She earned her bachelor's degree in mathematics with a minor in physics at theUniversity of California, Berkeley in 1961. At Berkeley, she had only one other female classmate in her major.[6] She applied to graduate mathematics programs at Berkeley andPrinceton. At the time Princeton was not accepting female students in mathematics.[7] She was accepted at Berkeley but instead moved to Boston and began working atMitre Corporation, where she became interested in computers and programming. She worked at Mitre for one year before taking a programming job at Harvard working on language translation.[7]
She then decided to go back to school and applied again to Berkeley, but also to Stanford and Harvard. In March 1968 she becameone of the first women in the United States to be awarded a Ph.D. from a computer science department when she was awarded her degree fromStanford University.[8][9][10] At Stanford, she worked withJohn McCarthy and was supported to work inartificial intelligence.[7] The topic of her Ph.D. thesis was a computer program to playchess endgames for which she developed the importantkiller heuristic.[11]
After graduating from Stanford, Liskov returned to Mitre to work as research staff.[2]
Liskov has led many significant projects, including the Venus operating system, a small, low-costtimesharing system; the design and implementation ofCLU;Argus, the first high-level language to support implementation of distributed programs and to demonstrate the technique ofpromise pipelining; and Thor, anobject-oriented database system. WithJeannette Wing, she developed a particular definition ofsubtyping, commonly known as theLiskov substitution principle. She leads the Programming Methodology Group atMIT, with a current research focus inByzantine fault tolerance anddistributed computing.[3] She was on the inaugural Engineering and Computer Science jury for theInfosys Prize in 2009.[12] Liskov's design and development of CLU and Argus would later have influence on many well known programming languages such as Java, C++, C#, and Ada.[13]
In 2023 Liskov was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute for "seminal contributions to computer programming languages and methodology, enabling the implementation of reliable, reusable programs".[27]
Liskov is Jewish.[28] In 1970, she married Nathan Liskov.[7] They have one son, Moses, who earned a PhD in computer science from MIT in 2004 and teaches computer science at theCollege of William and Mary.[2]
Busch-Vishniac, Ilene; Busch, Lauren; Tietjen, Jill (2024). "Chapter 43. Barbara Liskov".Women in the National Inventors Hall of Fame: The First 50 Years. Springer Nature.ISBN9783031755255.
^abcdGuttag, John (2005-01-01).The electron and the bit: electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1902–2002. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Dept.OCLC61332947.
^"Barbara Liskov".EngineerGirl. Retrieved2007-09-06. Profile from the National Academies of Engineering.
^Huberman (Liskov), Barbara Jane (1968).A program to play chess end games(PDF) (Report). Technical Report CS 106, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project Memo AI-65. Stanford University Department of Computer Science. Archived fromthe original(PDF) on February 11, 2017.
^"Honorary Doctors". Zurich: ETH Computer Science. 22 March 2006. Archived fromthe original on 8 January 2013. Retrieved29 October 2012.Barbara Liskov and Donald E. Knuth were awarded the title ETH Honorary Doctor on 19 November 2005.
John V. Guttag,Barbara Liskov,The Electron and The Bit: EECS at MIT, 1902–2002, Chapter VII: "Pioneering Women in EECS", pp. 225–239, 2003, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
