Biography

Niklaus Emil Wirth is a Swiss computer scientist, best known for designing several programming languages, including Pascal, Algol W, Modula, Modula-2, and Oberon and for pioneering several topics in software engineering. After a professorship at Stanford University, Dr. Wirth became a professor of informatics at ETH, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, his alma mater, where he stayed with the exception of a short stint at Xerox and California, until he retired in 1999.

In 1984, Dr. Wirth won the Turing Award for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages, which laid the foundation of modern programming. In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the ACM. He’s also been honored with IEEE Emanuel Piore Award, Leonardo da Vinci Medal, and ACM Outstanding Research Award in Software Engineering, among others.