John Backus, American mathematician and computer scientist, designed Fortran (born 1924)

John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist. He led the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of the Backus–Naur form (BNF), a widely used notation to define syntaxes of formal languages. He later did research into the function-level programming paradigm, presenting his findings in his influential 1977 Turing Award lecture "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?"

Fortran is a third-generation, compiled, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing.