John Cocke

John Cocke was an American computer scientist who spent his entire professional career at IBM, from 1956 until 1992, after earning a PhD in mathematics from Duke University, and he is widely regarded as the father of RISC architecture, the reduced instruction set computing approach to processor design. Working on the IBM 801 minicomputer project, Cocke showed that matching a computer instruction set closely to the simple instructions a compiler actually generates could deliver high performance at low hardware cost, an insight that reshaped processor architecture across the industry. He also made major contributions to compiler optimization theory, co-invented the CYK parsing algorithm, and contributed to speech recognition and machine translation research at IBM during the 1970s and 1980s, including pioneering the use of trigram language models. Cocke received the ACM Turing Award in 1987, the National Medal of Technology in 1991, and the National Medal of Science in 1994.