The A.M. Turing Award is given by the Association for Computing Machinery to a person selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field. Most of the recipients have been computer scientists.

The award is named for Alan Mathison Turing (June 23, 1912 - June 7, 1954), a British mathematician considered to be one of the fathers of modern computer science.

The Turing Award is sometimes called the "Nobel Prize of computing".

The award recipients, and the field in which they earned the recognition are listed below. Refer to the individual recipients for more detailed information on their achievements.

• 1966 Alan J. Perlis (advanced programming techniques, compiler construction)
• 1967 Maurice V. Wilkes (internally stored program, program libraries)
• 1968 Richard Hamming (numerical methods, automatic coding systems, error-detecting and error-correcting codes)
• 1969 Marvin Minsky
• 1970 James H. Wilkinson (numerical analysis, linear algebra, "backward" error analysis)
• 1971 John McCarthy (artificial intelligence)
• 1972 Edsger Dijkstra (the science and art of programming languages)
• 1973 Charles W. Bachman (database technology)
• 1974 Donald E. Knuth (analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages)
• 1975 Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon (artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, list processing)
• 1976 Michael O. Rabin and Dana S. Scott (nondeterministic machines)
• 1977 John Backus (high-level programming systems, formal procedures for the specification of programming languages)
• 1978 Robert W. Floyd (methodologies for the creation of efficient and reliable software)
• 1979 Kenneth E. Iverson (programming languages and mathematical notation, implementation of interactive systems, educational uses of APL, programming language theory and practice)
• 1980 C. Antony R. Hoare (definition and design of programming languages)
• 1981 Edgar F. Codd (database management systems, esp. relational databases)
• 1982 Stephen A. Cook (complexity of computation)
• 1983 Ken Thompson and Dennis M. Ritchie (generic operating systems theory, implementation of UNIX operating system)
• 1984 Niklaus Wirth (computer language development)
• 1985 Richard M. Karp (theory of algorithms esp. the theory of NP-completeness)
• 1986 John Hopcroft and Robert Tarjan (design and analysis of algorithms and data structures)
• 1987 John Cocke (theory of compilers, architecture of large systems, development of reduced instruction set computers (RISC))
• 1988 Ivan Sutherland (computer graphics)
• 1989 William (Velvel) Kahan (numerical analysis)
• 1990 Fernando J. Corbató (CTSS and Multics)
• 1991 Robin Milner (LCF, ML, CCS)
• 1992 Butler W. Lampson (distributed, personal computing environments)
• 1993 Juris Hartmanis and Richard E. Stearns (computational complexity theory)
• 1994 Edward Feigenbaum and Raj Reddy (large scale artificial intelligence systems)
• 1995 Manuel Blum (computational complexity theory, its application to cryptography and program checking)
• 1996 Amir Pnueli (temporal logic, program and systems verification)
• 1997 Douglas Engelbart (interactive computing)
• 1998 James Gray (database and transaction processing)
• 1999 Frederick P. Brooks, Jr (computer architecture, operating systems, software engineering)
• 2000 Andrew Chi-Chih Yao (theory of computation incl. pseudorandom number generation, cryptography, and communication complexity)
• 2001 Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard (object oriented programming)
• 2002 Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard M. Adleman (public key cryptography)