Perlis, Alan J., 19..-....

Perlis worked on Project Whirlwind at M.I.T. in 1948-1949 while earning his Ph.D. in Mathematics. He later worked at the Ballistic Research Laboratories before becoming the director of the Computing Laboratory and assistant professor of Mathematics at Purdue University. In 1956, he took the position of director of the Computation Center at Carnegie Institute of Technology (later Carnegie-Mellon University). He later served as the chair of the department of Mathematics (1960-1964) and Computer Science (1965-1971) at Carnegie. In 1971 he was appointed Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science at Yale University where he served as chair of the Computer Science department from 1976-1980. Throughout his professional life, his dominant interest remained programming languages.

In the mid 1950s, Perlis began to design the IT (Internal Translator) compiler at Purdue and he completed the project after moving to Carnegie Institute of Technology. As chair of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) committee charged to develop a common universal language in 1957, he worked to create ALGOL. Later Perlis worked on the APL programming language while at Yale. In the ACM, Perlis served as the first editor of the Communications of the ACM and as ACM president from 1962-1964.