2024-01-04 13:37:00
Swiss IT pioneer Niklaus Wirth died on January 1 at the age of 89, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) said on Thursday, confirming reports from several media outlets. He had received numerous awards, including the prestigious Turing Award.
Niklaus Wirth died on January 1 at the age of 89.
ats
“With him, Switzerland loses one of its greatest IT pioneers,” commented the portal inside-it.ch on the death of the IT specialist from Winterthur. From 1968 until his retirement in 1999, Niklaus Wirth was professor of computer science at ETH Zurich.
Born in Winterthur in 1934, Professor Wirth obtained a degree in electronics engineering at the ETH Zurich in 1958, then a master of science at the University of Laval (Quebec) in 1960 and finally a doctorate at the University of Berkeley (California) in 1963.
He was then appointed assistant at Stanford University (California) where he developed the PL360 programming language as well as a large part of the Algol W language. He returned to Switzerland in 1967 to take up an assistant position at the University. from Zurich then joined the ETHZ in 1968, where he created the Pascal programming language.
Wirth’s law
Niklaus Wirth had received numerous honors during his career, including the IBM Europe Scientific and Technical Prize, the Emanuel Piore Prize of the US Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers in 1983 and the Turing Prize of the Association for Computer Machinery in 1984. He is the only person from the German-speaking area to have received this award.
He was also named by the University of Bonn to the “Order for Merit in Sciences and the Arts”, one of the most prestigious academic distinctions, which includes Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann and Richard Strauss. .
Finally, he is the creator of a law that bears his name: Wirth’s Law, which states that programs slow down faster than hardware speeds up.
uc, ats
1704379996
#Black #Notebook #Swiss #pioneer #passed
