Today, Tuesday 4 April, the ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, named Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, as the recipient of the 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award.

The Turing award is recognized as the highest distinction in Computer Science and is sometimes referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing.” Sir Tim is being given this award for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale. The Web is considered one of the most influential computing innovations in history.

Sir Tim’s development and guardianship of the building blocks of the Web, the standards upon which it is built upon, continues at W3C. Jeff Jaffe, CEO of W3C, stated: “The Web has had an immense impact on the world; transforming every part of society: how we communicate, how we learn, how we acquire information, and how we engage in commerce. Tim’s soaring vision of what was possible in the world is anchored on breakthrough contributions to computing – which is what is recognized by the Turing Award.”

For more information on the award, Sir Tim, and the W3C, see the W3C press release.