NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Niklaus Wirth

Niklaus E. Wirth (born February 15, 1934) is a Swiss computer scientist, best known for designing several programming languages, including Pascal, and for pioneering several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984 he won the Turing Award for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages. Image File history File links Download high resolution version (800x612, 62 KB) Summary taken on his visit to our university Licensing File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... February 15 is the 46th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1934 (MCMXXXIV) was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... Winterthur is a city in the Canton of Zurich in Switzerland. ... Computer science, or computing science, is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation and application in computer systems. ... The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly known as Stanford University (or simply Stanford), is a private university located approximately 37 miles (60 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles northwest of San JosÃ© in an unincorporated area of Santa Clara County. ... The University of Zurich (in German: UniversitÃ¤t ZÃ¼rich) is the largest university of Switzerland, in the city of Zurich. ... The ETH Zurich, often called Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, is a science and technology university in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. ... Bold text // Headline text Link title This article is about the computer research center. ... The ETH Zurich, often called Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, is a science and technology university in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. ... Algol-W is a programming language. ... Pascal is an imperative computer programming language, developed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a language particularly suitable for structured programming. ... In the mid-1970s, after designing the Pascal programming language, Niklaus Wirth began experimenting with program concurrency and modularization, which led to the design of the Modula programming language. ... Modula-2 is a computer programming language invented by Niklaus Wirth at ETH around 1978, as a successor to Modula, an intermediate language by him. ... Oberon is a reflective programming language created in the late 1980s by Professor Niklaus Wirth (creator of the Pascal, Modula, and Modula-2 programming languages) and his associates at ETHZ in Switzerland. ... The A.M. Turing Award is given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to a person selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. ... February 15 is the 46th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1934 (MCMXXXIV) was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... Computer science, or computing science, is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation and application in computer systems. ... A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer. ... Pascal is an imperative computer programming language, developed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a language particularly suitable for structured programming. ... Software engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software. ... The A.M. Turing Award is given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to a person selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. ...

Biography

Wirth was born in Winterthur, Switzerland, in 1934. In 1959 he earned a degree in Electronics Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. In 1960 he earned an M.Sc. from Université Laval, Canada. Then in 1963 he was awarded a Ph.D.in EECS from the University of California, Berkeley, supervised by the computer designer pioneer Harry Huskey. Winterthur is a city in the Canton of Zurich in Switzerland. ... 1934 (MCMXXXIV) was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with electrical and electronics engineering. ... ETH Zurich (from its German name Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, ETHZ) is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland. ... Location within Switzerland ZÃ¼rich[?] (German pronunciation IPA: ; usually spelled Zurich in English) is the largest city in Switzerland (population: 366,145 in 2004; population of urban area: 1,091,732) and capital of the canton of ZÃ¼rich. ... 1960 (MCMLX) was a leap year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1960 calendar). ... UniversitÃ© Laval (Laval University) is the oldest centre of education in Canada, and was the first institution in America to offer higher education in French. ... 1963 (MCMLXIII) was a common year starting on Tuesday (the link is to a full 1963 calendar). ... Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated Ph. ... EECS (sometimes pronounced eeks) is an abbreviation for Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. ... Sather tower (the Campanile) looking out over the San Francisco Bay and Mount Tamalpais. ... Harry Huskey (born 1916) is an American computer designer pioneer. ...

From 1963 to 1967 he served as Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and again at the University of Zurich. Then in 1968 he became Professor of Informatics at ETH in Zurich, taking a two year sabbatical at Xerox PARC in California. 1963 (MCMLXIII) was a common year starting on Tuesday (the link is to a full 1963 calendar). ... 1967 (MCMLXVII) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar (the link is to a full 1967 calendar). ... Computer science, or computing science, is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation and application in computer systems. ... The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly known as Stanford University (or simply Stanford), is a private university located approximately 37 miles (60 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles northwest of San JosÃ© in an unincorporated area of Santa Clara County. ... The University of Zurich (in German: UniversitÃ¤t ZÃ¼rich) is the largest university of Switzerland, in the city of Zurich. ... 1968 (MCMLXVIII) was a leap year starting on Monday. ... Informatics includes the science of information, the practice of information processing, and the engineering of information systems. ... Eth (Ã, Ã°), also spelled edh or eÃ°, is a letter used in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and present-day Icelandic, and in Faroese language which call the letter edd. ... Location within Switzerland ZÃ¼rich[?] (German pronunciation IPA: ; usually spelled Zurich in English) is the largest city in Switzerland (population: 366,145 in 2004; population of urban area: 1,091,732) and capital of the canton of ZÃ¼rich. ... Bold text // Headline text Link title This article is about the computer research center. ... Official language(s) English Capital Sacramento Largest city Los Angeles Area Ranked 3rd - Total 158,302 sq mi (410,000 kmÂ²) - Width 250 miles (400 km) - Length 770 miles (1,240 km) - % water 4. ...

Wirth retired in 1999. 1999 (MCMXCIX) was a common year starting on Friday, and was designated the International Year of Older Persons by the United Nations. ...

Works

Wirth was the chief designer of the programming languages Euler, Algol W, Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, and Oberon. He was also a major part of the design and implementation team for the Lilith and Oberon operating systems, and for the Lola digital hardware design and simulation system. He received the ACM Turing Award for the development of these languages. A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer. ... Euler is a programming language created by Niklaus Wirth and Helmut Weber, conceived as an extension and generalization of ALGOL 60. ... Algol-W is a programming language. ... Pascal is an imperative computer programming language, developed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a language particularly suitable for structured programming. ... In the mid-1970s, after designing the Pascal programming language, Niklaus Wirth began experimenting with program concurrency and modularization, which led to the design of the Modula programming language. ... Modula-2 is a computer programming language invented by Niklaus Wirth at ETH around 1978, as a successor to Modula, an intermediate language by him. ... Oberon is a reflective programming language created in the late 1980s by Professor Niklaus Wirth (creator of the Pascal, Modula, and Modula-2 programming languages) and his associates at ETHZ in Switzerland. ... Lilith is the name of custom built workstation (originating sometimes before 1980) using the AMD 2901 bit-slice processor by the group of Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zürich. ... Tiled window arrangement of Oberon Oberon is an operating system, originally developed as part of the NS32032-based Ceres workstation project; it is written entirely in the Oberon programming language. ... Lola is designed to be a simple hardware description language for describing synchronous, digital circuits. ... The Association for Computing Machinery, or ACM, was founded in 1947 as the worlds first scientific and educational computing society. ... The A.M. Turing Award is given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to a person selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. ...

His article Program Development by Stepwise Refinement, about the teaching of programming, is considered to be a classic text in software engineering. In 1975 he wrote the book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, which gained wide recognition and is still useful today. Software engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software. ...

He designed the simple programming language PL/0 to illustrate compiler design. It has formed the basis for many university compiler design classes. There are at least two programming languages known as PL/0. ...

In 1995, he popularized the adage now known as Wirth's law: "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster", although in his 1995 paper A Plea for Lean Software he attributes it to Martin Reiser.^[1] 1995 (MCMXCV) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Wirths law in computing was made popular by Niklaus Wirth in 1995. ... Computer software (or simply software) refers to one or more computer programs and data held in the storage of a computer for some purpose. ... Hardware is the general term that is used to describe physical artifacts of a technology. ...

Quotes

Trivia

Philippe Kahn, renowned wireless and software technologist, and founder of Borland, studied under Wirth at the ETH Zürich. Philippe Kahn Philippe Kahn Working on the first camera-phones Philippe Kahn (born March 16, 1952)[1] is an American technology innovator and entrepreneur, French-born, known as the founder of Borland, a producer of software development tools for as well as Starfish Software, the creator of the first wireless... Borland Software Corporation is a software company headquartered in California. ... ETH Zurich (from its German name EidgenÃ¶ssische Technische Hochschule ZÃ¼rich, ETHZ) is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in ZÃ¼rich, Switzerland. ...

Gallery

See also

The extended Backusâ€“Naur form (EBNF) is an extension of the basic Backusâ€“Naur form (BNF) metasyntax notation. ... Wirth Syntax Notation (WSN) is a metasyntax notation, that is, a formal way to describe formal languages. ...

References

Computer is an IEEE Computer Society practitioner-oriented magazine issued to all members of the society. ... 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the Anno Domini (common) era. ... January 13 is the 13th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ...

External links

v • d • e

Turing award laureates

1966: Perlis • 67: Wilkes • 68: Hamming • 69: Minsky
1970: Wilkinson • 71: McCarthy • 72: Dijkstra • 73: Bachman • 74: Knuth • 75: Newell, Simon • 76: Rabin, Scott • 77: Backus • 78: Floyd • 79: Iverson
1980: Hoare • 81: Codd • 82: Cook • 83: Thompson, Ritchie • 84: Wirth • 85: Karp • 86: Hopcroft, Tarjan • 87: Cocke • 88: Sutherland • 89: Kahan
1990: Corbató • 91: Milner • 92: Lampson • 93: Hartmanis, Stearns • 94: Feigenbaum, Reddy • 95: Blum • 96: Pnueli • 97: Engelbart • 98: Gray • 99: Brooks
2000: Yao • 01: Dahl, Nygaard • 02: Rivest, Shamir, Adleman • 03: Kay • 04: Cerf, Kahn • 05: Naur • 06: Allen Image File history File links Wikiquote-logo-en. ... Wikiquote is a sister project of Wikipedia, using the same MediaWiki software. ... ETH Zurich (from its German name EidgenÃ¶ssische Technische Hochschule ZÃ¼rich, ETHZ) is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in ZÃ¼rich, Switzerland. ... Communications of the ACM (CACM) is the flagship monthly magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery. ... 1971 (MCMLXXI) was a common year starting on Friday. ... 2000 (MM) was a leap year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The A.M. Turing Award is given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to a person selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. ... Alan Jay Perlis (April 1, 1922 - February 7, 1990) was a prominent U.S. computer scientist. ... Maurice V. Wilkes Maurice Vincent Wilkes (born June 26, 1913 in Dudley, Staffordshire, England) is a British computer scientist, credited with several important developments in computing. ... Richard Wesley Hamming (February 11, 1915 â€“ January 7, 1998) was a mathematician whose work had many implications for computer science and telecommunications. ... Marvin Lee Minsky (born August 9, 1927), sometimes affectionately known as Old Man Minsky, is an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of MITs AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy. ... James Hardy Wilkinson (27 September 1919â€“5 October 1986) was a prominent figure in the field of numerical analysis, a field at the boundary of applied mathematics and computer science particularly useful to physics and engineering. ... John McCarthy (born September 4, 1927, in Boston, Massachusetts, sometimes known affectionately as Uncle John McCarthy), is a prominent computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence. ... Edsger Dijkstra Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (Rotterdam, May 11, 1930 â€“ Nuenen, August 6, 2002; IPA: ) was a Dutch computer scientist. ... Charles W. Bachman is a prominent computer scientist, particularly in the area of databases. ... Donald Ervin Knuth ( or Ka-NOOTH[1], Chinese: [2]) (b. ... Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 - July 19, 1992) was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND corporation and at Carnegie-Mellonâ€™s School of Computer Science. ... Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 â€“ February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, computer science, public administration, economics, management, and philosophy of science and a professor, most notably, at Carnegie Mellon University. ... Michael Oser Rabin (born 1931 in Breslau, Germany, today in Poland) is a noted computer scientist and a recipient of the Turing Award, the most prestigious award in the field. ... Dana Stewart Scott (born 1932) is the emeritus Hillman University Professor of Computer Science, Philosophy, and Mathematical Logic at Carnegie Mellon University; he is now retired and lives in Berkeley, California. ... John Backus (born December 3, 1924) is an American computer scientist, notable as the inventor of the first high-level programming language (FORTRAN), the Backus-Naur form (BNF, the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax), and the concept of Function-level programming. ... Robert W Floyd (June 8, 1936 - September 25, 2001) was an eminent computer scientist. ... Kenneth Eugene Iverson (17 December 1920, Camrose, Alberta, Canada â€“ 19 October 2004, Toronto, Ontario, Canada) was a computer scientist most notable for developing the APL programming language in 1957. ... Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (Tony Hoare or C.A.R. Hoare, born January 11, 1934) is a British computer scientist, probably best known for the development of Quicksort, the worlds most widely used sorting algorithm, in 1960. ... Edgar Ted Codd Edgar Frank Codd (August 23, 1923 â€“ April 18, 2003) was a British computer scientist who made seminal contributions to the theory of relational databases. ... Stephen A. Cook is a noted computer scientist. ... Kenneth Thompson redirects here. ... Dennis Ritchie Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (born September 9, 1941) is a computer scientist notable for his influence on ALTRAN, B, BCPL, C, Multics, and Unix. ... Richard M. Karp (born 1935) is a computer scientist, notable for research in the theory of algorithms, for which he received a Turing Award in 1985. ... John Hopcroft John E. Hopcroft (born October 7, 1939) is a renowned theoretical computer scientist and the grandson of Jacob Nist, founder of the Seattle Box Company. ... Robert Endre Tarjan (born April 30, 1948 in Pomona, California) is a renowned computer scientist. ... John Cocke (May 30, 1925 - July 16, 2002) was an American computer scientist recognised for his large contribution to computer architecture and optimizing compiler design. ... Ivan Sutherland Ivan Sutherland, working at MIT (1963) Ivan Edward Sutherland (born 1938 in Hastings, Nebraska) is a computer programmer and Internet pioneer. ... William Velvel Kahan (born June 5, 1933, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is an eminent mathematician and computer scientist. ... Fernando JosÃ© CorbatÃ³ (born July 1, 1926) is a prominent computer scientist, notable as a pioneer in the development of time-sharing operating systems. ... Robin Milner is a prominent British computer scientist. ... Butler W. Lampson is a computer scientist, considered to be one of the most significant in the history of the field. ... Juris Hartmanis (born July 7, 1928 in Riga, Latvia) is a prominent computer scientist who, with Richard E. Stearns, received the 1993 ACM Turing Award in recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory. Born in Latvia, he moved to Germany after... Richard Edwin Stearns is a prominent computer scientist who, with Juris Hartmanis, received the 1993 ACM Turing Award in recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory. Stearns is now Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University at Albany, which... Edward Albert Feigenbaum (born January 20, 1936) is a computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence. ... Dabbala Rajagopal Raj Reddy (born June 13, 1937 in Katoor, India, near Chennai) is a world-renowned researcher in Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Human-Computer Interaction. ... Manuel Blum (born 26 April 1938 in Caracas, Venezuela) is a computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1995 In recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its application to cryptography and program checking. // Biography Blum attended MIT, where he received his bachelors... Amir Pnueli (born April 22, 1941) is an Israeli computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1996 for seminal work introducing temporal logic into computing science and for outstanding contributions to program and systems verification. ... Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart (born January 30, 1925 in Oregon) is an American inventor of German descent. ... James Nicholas Jim Gray (born 1944, presumed lost at sea January 28, 2007) is an American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1998 for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation. ... Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr. ... Andrew Chi-Chih Yao (Chinese: å§šæœŸæ™º; Hanyu Pinyin: ) (born December 24, 1946) is a prominent computer scientist. ... Professor emeritus Ole-Johan Dahl (October 12, 1931 â€“ June 29, 2002) was a Norwegian computer scientist and is considered to be one of the fathers of Simula and object-oriented programming along with Kristen Nygaard. ... Kristen Nygaard Kristen Nygaard (August 27, 1926 - August 10, 2002) was a Norwegian mathematician, computer programming language pioneer and politician. ... Professor Ron Rivest Professor Ronald Linn Rivest (born 1947, Schenectady, New York) is a cryptographer, and is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Computer Science at MITs Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. ... Adi Shamir at the CRYPTO 2003 conference. ... Leonard Adleman Leonard Adleman (born December 31, 1945) is a theoretical computer scientist and professor of computer science and molecular biology at the University of Southern California. ... Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) is an American computer scientist, known for his early work on object-oriented programming and user interface design. ... Vinton Gray Cerf (born June 23, 1943) is an American computer scientist who is commonly referred to as one of the founding fathers of the Internet for his key technical and managerial role, together with Bob Kahn, in the creation of the Internet and the TCP/IP protocols which it... Robert E. Kahn, (born December 23, 1938), along with Vinton G. Cerf, invented the TCP/IP protocol, the technology used to transmit information on the modern Internet. ... Portrait of Peter Naur taken 1968, courtesy of Robert M. McClure. ... Frances E. Allen (born c. ...

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