Today, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced it has chosen our founder and web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee as the 2016 recipient of its prestigious A.M. Turing Award.

The award, named after British computer scientist Alan M. Turing, is presented annually to a computer scientist or engineer who has made a significant technical contribution to the computing field. It is often referred to as “the Nobel Prize of computing”. This year carries extra significance, as the ACM is celebrating 50 years of the Turing Award.

The award honours Sir Tim for his invention of the world wide web, and his decision and continued work to make it open and free for anyone to use. Receiving the award in this milestone year underlines the significance of Tim Berners-Lee’s invention, which has changed the way we communicate, create and collaborate.

Sir Tim said:

“I’m pleased and humbled to receive this award. The 28 years since the web’s invention have brought a mix of delights, challenges and opportunities, and I remain committed to ensuring the web delivers benefits to everyone, everywhere.”

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee is Founding Director of the World Wide Web Foundation. He is also a professor at both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oxford. He is Director of the World Wide Web Consortium – which develops technical standards for the web – and is co-founder and President of the Open Data Institute. He will formally receive the 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award on June 24, 2017, following the ACM conference on the future of computing.

Learn more about the history of Tim Berners-Lee’s invention. For Web Foundation updates, follow us on Twitter at @webfoundation and sign up to our mailing list.