Fortran was created by John Backus and his team at IBM for mathematical formula translation.
John Backus led the IBM team that developed Fortran in the 1950s. The name originally came from “FORmula TRANslation,” describing the language’s central purpose: allowing programmers to express mathematical calculations in a notation closer to ordinary formulas than machine code or assembly language.
The first Fortran compiler was completed in 1957 for the IBM 704. Its ability to translate high-level source code into efficient machine code helped demonstrate that programming languages could improve productivity without necessarily giving up performance. Fortran became especially important in scientific and engineering computing.
The language has evolved through standards including Fortran 77, Fortran 90, and later revisions. Modern Fortran supports modules, array operations, parallel programming features, and object-oriented techniques. Fortran is sometimes confused with COBOL: both are historically important, but Fortran’s original focus was numerical and scientific computation, while COBOL targeted business data processing.