Kenneth Eugene Iverson (17 December 1920 – 19 October 2004) was a Canadian computer scientist noted for the development of the programming language APL. He was honored with the Turing Award in 1979 "for his pioneering effort in programming languages and mathematical notation resulting in what the computing field now knows as APL; for his contributions to the implementation of interactive systems, to educational uses of APL, and to programming language theory and practice". His parents were farmers who came to Alberta from North Dakota; his ancestors came from Trondheim, Norway. and died in Toronto on 19 October 2004 at age 83. initially in Grade 1, promoted to Grade 2 after 3 months and to Grade 4 by the end of June 1927.

He left school after Grade 9 because it was the depths of the Great Depression and there was work to do on the family farm, and because he thought further schooling only led to becoming a schoolteacher and he had no desire to become one. At age 17, while still out of school, he enrolled in a correspondence course on radios with De Forest Training in Chicago, and learned calculus by self-study from a textbook.

During World War II, while serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, he took correspondence courses toward a high school diploma.

After the war, Iverson enrolled in Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, taking advantage of government support for ex-servicemen and under threat from an Air Force buddy who said he would "beat his brains out if he did not grasp the opportunity".

Howard Aiken had developed the Harvard Mark I, one of the first large-scale digital computers, while Wassily Leontief was an economist who was developing the input–output model of economic analysis, work for which he would later receive the Nobel Prize. Leontief's model required large matrices and Iverson worked on programs that could evaluate these matrices on the Harvard Mark IV computer. Iverson received a Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1954 with a dissertation based on this work.

At Harvard, Iverson met Eoin Whitney, a 2-time Putnam Fellow and fellow graduate student from Alberta.]]

Iverson stayed on at Harvard as an assistant professor to implement the world's first graduate program in "automatic data processing".