Top 10 algorithms of the 20th century as ranked by SIAM editors . SIAM is the society of applied and industrial mathematics.Monte Carlo method ,Simplex method for linear programming and others included here
1957: John Backus leads a team at IBM in developing the Fortran optimizing compiler.
The creation of Fortran may rank as the single most important event in the history of computer programming: Finally, scientists(and others) could tell the computer what they wanted it to do, without having to descend into the netherworld of machine code.
Although modest by modern compiler standards—Fortran I consisted of a mere 23,500 assembly-language instructions—the early compiler was nonetheless capable of surprisingly sophisticated computations. As Backus himself recalls in a recent history of Fortran I, II, and III, published in 1998 in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, the compiler “produced code of such efficiency that its output would startle the programmers who studied it.”
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