I first came across Tony Hoare about 24 years ago while learning C from The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Richie. I knew him only as C. A. R. Hoare for a long time. When I got on the Internet, it took me a while to realise that when people said Tony Hoare, it was the same person I knew as C. A. R. Hoare. Quoting the relevant text from the book:

> Another good example of recursion is quicksort, a sorting algorithm developed by C.A.R. Hoare in 1962. Given an array, one element is chosen and the others partitioned in two subsets - those less than the partition element and those greater than or equal to it. The same process is then applied recursively to the two subsets. When a subset has fewer than two elements, it doesn't need any sorting; this stops the recursion.

> Our version of quicksort is not the fastest possible, but it's one of the simplest. We use the middle element of each subarray for partitioning. [...]

It was one of the first few 'serious' algorithms I learnt to implement on my own. More generally, the book had a profound impact on my life. It made me fall in love with computer programming and ultimately choose it as my career. Thanks to K&R, Tony Hoare and the many other giants on whose shoulders I stand.