Dr. Martín Abadi
Niklaus Wirth EMERITUS
Professor of Informatics, ETH Zürich
Winterthur, Switzerland
More Info
  • 1994
  • Computer Science and Information Technology (C.S.E)
More Info
  • 1994
  • Computer Science and Information Technology (C.S.E)
Election Remark
Niklaus Emil Wirth (born 15 February 1934) is a Swiss computer scientist. He has designed several programming languages, including Pascal, and pioneered several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984, he won the Turing Award, generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science, for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages.
 
In 1963, he was awarded a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) from the University of California, Berkeley, supervised by the computer design pioneer Harry Huskey.
 
He was involved with developing international standards in programming and informatics, as a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi, which specified, maintains, and supports the programming languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.
 
In 2004, he was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for seminal work in programming languages and algorithms, including Euler, Algol-W, Pascal, Modula, and Oberon."
 
Wirth was the chief designer of the programming languages Euler (1965), PL360 (1966), ALGOL W (1966), Pascal (1970),[9] Modula (1975), Modula-2 (1978), Oberon (1987), Oberon-2 (1991), and Oberon-07 (2007).

He was also a major part of the design and implementation team for the operating systems Medos-2 (1983, for the Lilith workstation), and Oberon (1987, for the Ceres workstation), and for the Lola (1995) digital hardware design and simulation system.

In 1984, he received the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Turing Award for the development of these languages.

In 1994, he was inducted as a Fellow of the ACM and elected as member of the European Academy of Engineering.

In 2005, he became Emeritus Member of the European Academy of Engineering.