Ivan E. Sutherland received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988. The Turing Award is recognized as the "highest distinction in Computer science" and "Nobel Prize of computing". The award is named after Alan Turing, mathematician and reader in mathematics at the University of Manchester.

Lecture by Ivan E. Sutherland

The circuits from which we build computers have changed enormously during my lifetime, and so have the ways we express software algorithms. We use computers today in ways unimaginable when each computer was a room full of equipment. But in spite of vast changes in computer circuits, software, and applications, much of our thinking about what a computer is remains unchanged. We tend to think of a computer as a sequential device able to follow a series of specific instructions.
Given the billions of logic elements now available to computer designers how might changes in thinking enhance the value of computing devices? Computing now faces limits from the speed of light and from heat generation that could previously be ignored. The mathematics of computing has little to say about these very real physical limits and programming languages remain largely silent on both communication and energy. It is time to rethink what a computer is and to evolve new ways to build, understand, and command them.

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