Prof. Niklaus Wirth
Niklaus Wirth was born on 15 February 1934 in Winterthur, Switzerland. He received the degree of Electronics Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich in 1959, an M.Sc. from Laval University, Canada, in 1960, and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1963.
He was Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University (1963 - 1967), and then at the University of Zurich. In 1968 he became Professor of Informatics at ETH Zurich. He spent two sabbatical years at the Xerox PARC in California, and he is retired since April 1999.
He designed several programming languages, including Pascal, Modula, Modula-2 and Oberon, 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 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."
Niklaus Wirth died on New Year's Day 2024, at age 89.