Barbara Liskov

Barbara Liskov is an American computer scientist known for foundational work in programming language design and distributed computing, and for the Liskov substitution principle, a widely used rule in object-oriented programming stating that an object of a subtype should be usable anywhere an object of its parent type is expected without altering the correctness of the program. In the 1970s at MIT, she led the design of the CLU programming language, which introduced data abstraction and the concept of abstract data types in a form that influenced most later object-oriented languages. She also became, in 1968, one of the first women in the United States to earn a doctorate in computer science, and she later contributed influential work on distributed systems, including Byzantine fault tolerance. Liskov received the Turing Award in 2008 for her contributions to the practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, particularly relating to data abstraction, fault tolerance and distributed computing.