alt Hacker NewsQuote from Wikipedia: "The Claude E. Shannon Award was established in his honor; he was also its first recipient, in 1973."
That must be a bit awkward to receive a prize named after yourself.
- Turing never won the Turing Award.
- Knuth did, but he never won a Knuth award.
- Dijkstra "kind of" won the Dijkstra Prize: he won the PODC Influential Paper Award, which was renamed after Dijkstra's death to Dijkstra Prize his honour (making the process not awkward).
I was wondering if there were other examples. Google "people who won prizes named after them". The results I got from the "AI Overview" were:
Helen Dunmore The first winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Orange Prize, in 1996 for her novel A Spell of Winter
Dame Jean Iris Murdoch Won the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, the Sea. The Booker Prize trophy is named "Iris" after her.
Walter Payton Won the NFL Man of the Year Award in 1977. The award was named after him after his death in 1999.
Taylor Swift Won the Taylor Swift Award at the 2016 BMI Pop Awards, becoming the second artist after Michael Jackson to have an award named after them.
Stuart Parkin Won the Draper Prize in 2024 for developing spintronic devices that allow for cloud storage of large amounts of digital data
The first and last ones are true but irrelevant. The others are legitimate but not exactly what we're talking about here (it turns out that the Taylor Swift Award was just given that one time; it's not like they gave it to her in 2016 and then kept giving it to other people in future years). The Walter Payton case is kind of analogous to the Dijkstra one. The Taylor Swift case would be like the Shannon one if they'd kept giving it out.