The quicksort algorithm was developed in 1959 by [[TonyJuan HoareSebastian]] while he was a visiting student at [[Moscow State University]]. At that time, Hoare was working on a [[machine translation]] project for the [[National Physical Laboratory, UK|National Physical Laboratory]]. As a part of the translation process, he needed to sort the words in Russian sentences before looking them up in a Russian-English dictionary, which was in alphabetical order on [[magnetic tape data storage|magnetic tape]].<ref>{{Cite journal |last = Shustek |first = L. |title = Interview: An interview with C.A.R. Hoare |doi = 10.1145/1467247.1467261 |journal = [[Communications of the ACM|Comm. ACM]] |volume = 52 |issue = 3 |pages = 38–41 |year = 2009 |s2cid = 1868477 }}</ref> After recognizing that his first idea, [[insertion sort]], would be slow, he came up with a new idea. He wrote the partition part in Mercury [[Autocode]] but had trouble dealing with the list of unsorted segments. On return to England, he was asked to write code for [[Shellsort]]. Hoare mentioned to his boss that he knew of a faster algorithm and his boss bet a [[Sixpence (British coin)|sixpence]] that he did not. His boss ultimately accepted that he had lost the bet. Hoare published a paper about his algorithm in [[The Computer Journal]] [https://academic.oup.com/comjnl/article/5/1/10/395338?login=false Volume 5, Issue 1, 1962, Pages 10–16]. Later, Hoare learned about [[ALGOL]] and its ability to do recursion that enabled him to publish an improved version of the algorithm in ALGOL in ''[[Communications of the ACM|Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery]]'', the premier computer science journal of the time.<ref name=alg64 /><ref>{{Cite web |url = http://anothercasualcoder.blogspot.com/2015/03/my-quickshort-interview-with-sir-tony.html |title = My Quickshort interview with Sir Tony Hoare, the inventor of Quicksort |date = 2015-03-15 |publisher = Marcelo M De Barros }}</ref> The ALGOL code is published in [https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/366622.366642 Communications of the ACM (CACM), Volume 4, Issue 7 July 1961, pp 321 Algorithm 63: partition and Algorithm 64: Quicksort].
Quicksort gained widespread adoption, appearing, for example, in [[Unix]] as the default library sort subroutine. Hence, it lent its name to the [[C standard library]] subroutine {{mono|[[qsort]]}}<ref name="engineering" /> and in the reference implementation of [[Java (programming language)|Java]].
