Joe Wallwork, Institute of Computing for Climate Science, University of Cambridge, [email protected]
One month from today (15th October) marks seventy years since the first Fortran manual was published, making it an extremely well established programming language for scientific computing.
Over Fortran’s seven decades of usage, it has supported critical infrastructure and technological advances in a range of scientific fields such as nuclear engineering, weather and climate forecasting, and materials science. Fortran continues to be the go-to language in these domains and others.
To celebrate Fortran’s outstanding contributions to advancing science and engineering, the Institute of Computing for Climate Science (ICCS) will be hosting a ‘Celebrating 70 years of Fortran’ event at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, United Kingdom, on 1st December 2026.
Workshop outline
The main workshop will be held from 14:30-18:15 in the museum conference suite and will be followed by an evening drinks reception in the exhibition hall (including a demonstration of the 1940’s experimental computer, ‘Baby’).
The workshop will take the form of a retrospective, with a keynote address from Damian Rouson, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory looking back on how far Fortran has come in the past 70 years, lightning talks about the current exciting developments and community initiatives right now, and an open breakout discussion looking forward to the next 70 years. There are opportunities to submit lightning talks and posters, as well as to propose breakout discussion topics.
Registration
Attendance is free of charge, thanks to the support of our funders and sponsors.
To register, complete the following form: https://forms.gle/NjXfManJWmwLX7sc7.
Whilst it will be a primarily in-person event, there will also be an option to join remotely via Zoom.
Registration will close on 9th November 2026.
Further information
See the event webpage for all further details about the event, including the full programme and instructions on how to submit lightning talks and posters.
This blog post was also published on the CAKE website at https://www.cake.ac.uk/news/fortran-birthday/.