Brooks receives Bower Award

Frederick P. Brooks Jr. has won the 1995 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science, the richest US prize in science. Brooks is the Kenan Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

This international award is given by the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and includes a gold medal and a cash prize of at least $250,000.

Brooks, who coined the term "computer architecture," was honored for "separat[ing] computer software from hardware, thereby allowing these two fundamental realms of the computer age to develop dynamically and independently; for originating the eight-bit byte to facilitate text processing; and for pioneering the application of computer graphics to a broad array of biomedical and engineering problems," the prize's citation said.

"This squarely places computer science as a discipline on a par with all the other hard sciences, where it should be but not always is," said Ruzena Bajcsy, professor of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. "It has recognized a man who combines experimental and theoretical work in the best tradition, to which the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania has adhered ever since the ENIAC."