| Year | Winners | Citation |
| 1996 |
Leonard Adleman, Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman, Ralph Merkle, Ronald Rivest, and Adi Shamir |
For "the conception and first effective realization of public-key cryptography".[4] |
| 1997 |
Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv |
For their pioneering work in data compression, leading to their LZ algorithm which "yields the best compression rate achievable by finite-state encoders" and "can be found in virtually every modern computer".[5] |
| 1998 |
Randal Bryant, Edmund M. Clarke, E. Allen Emerson, and Kenneth L. McMillan |
For "their invention of 'symbolic model checking,' a method of formally checking system designs widely used in the computer hardware industry".[6] |
| 1999 |
Daniel Sleator and Robert Tarjan |
For "creating the Splay-Tree Data Structure [... ,] one of the most widely used data structures invented in the last 20 years".[7] |
| 2000 |
Narendra Karmarkar |
For "his theoretical work in devising an Interior Point method for linear programming that provably runs in polynomial time, and for his implementation work suggesting that Interior Point methods could be effective for linear programming in practice as well as theory".[8] |
| 2001 |
Eugene Myers |
For "his contribution to sequencing the human genome, the complete DNA content of a human cell, and encoding all of its genes, the basic building blocks of life".[9] |
| 2002 |
Peter Franaszek |
For "his seminal and sustained contributions to the theory and application of constrained channel coding".[10] |
| 2003 |
Gary Miller, Michael Rabin, Robert Solovay, and Volker Strassen |
For "their contributions to realizing the practical uses of cryptography and for demonstrating the power of algorithms that make random choices", through work which "led to two probabilistic primality tests, known as the Solovay–Strassen test and the Miller–Rabin test".[11] |
| 2004 |
Yoav Freund and Robert Schapire |
For their "seminal work and distinguished contributions [...] to the development of the theory and practice of boosting, a general and provably effective method of producing arbitrarily accurate prediction rules by combining weak learning rules"; specifically, for AdaBoost, their machine learning algorithm which "can be used to significantly reduce the error of algorithms used in statistical analysis, spam filtering, fraud detection, optical character recognition, and market segmentation, among other applications".[12] |
| 2005 |
Gerard Holzmann, Robert Kurshan, Moshe Vardi, and Pierre Wolper |
For "their contribution to techniques that provide powerful formal verification tools for hardware and software systems".[13] |
| 2006 |
Robert Brayton |
For "his innovative contributions to logic synthesis and electronic system simulation, which have made possible rapid circuit design technologies for the electronic design automation industry".[14] |
| 2007 |
Bruno Buchberger |
For "his role in developing the theory of Groebner Bases, which has become a crucial building block to computer algebra, and is widely used in science, engineering, and computer science".[15] |
| 2008 |
Corinna Cortes and Vladimir Vapnik |
For "their revolutionary development of a highly effective algorithm known as Support Vector Machines (SVM), a set of related supervised learning methods used for data classification and regression", which is "one of the most frequently used algorithms in machine learning, and is used in medical diagnosis, weather forecasting, and intrusion detection among many other practical applications".[16] |
| 2009 |
Mihir Bellare and Phillip Rogaway |
For "their development of practice-oriented provable security, which has resulted in high-quality, cost-effective cryptography, a key component for Internet security in an era of explosive growth in online transactions".[17] |
| 2010 |
Kurt Mehlhorn |
For "contributions to algorithm engineering that led to creation of the Library of Efficient Data types and Algorithms (LEDA)", a software collection of data structures and algorithms which "has been incorporated in the applied research programs of thousands of companies worldwide in telecommunications, bioinformatics, Computer-aided design (CAD) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), banking, optical products, and transportation".[18] |
| 2011 |
Hanan Samet |
For "pioneering research on quadtrees and other multidimensional spatial data structures for sorting spatial information, as well as his well-received books, which have profoundly influenced the theory and application of these structures".[19] |
| 2012 |
Andrei Broder, Moses S Charikar and Piotr Indyk |
For "their groundbreaking work on Locality-Sensitive Hashing that has had great impact in many fields of computer science including computer vision, databases, information retrieval, machine learning, and signal processing".[20] |
| 2013 |
Robert D. Blumofe, and Charles E. Leiserson |
For "contributions to robust parallel and distributed computing. They developed provably efficient randomized “work-stealing” scheduling algorithms, and Cilk, a small set of linguistic primitives for programming multithreaded computations." |
| 2014 |
James Demmel |
For "contributions to algorithms and software for numerical linear algebra used in scientific computing and large-scale data analysis."[21] |
| 2015 |
Michael Luby |
For "for groundbreaking contributions to erasure correcting codes, which are essential for improving the quality of video transmission over the Internet."[22] |