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Top 10 Fascinating Facts about Niklaus Wirth

Niklaus Emil Wirth was born on 15 February 1934. He 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 the article are the top ten fascinating facts about Niklaus Wirth.

1. He graduated from various institutions until he got his Doctor of Philosophy

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In 1959, he earned a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in electronic engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH Zürich). In 1960, he earned a Master of Science (MSc) from Université Laval, Canada.

In 1963, he was awarded a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) from the University of California, Berkeley, supervised by the computer design pioneer Harry Huskey. Wirth must have been a great enthusiast in education!

2. He taught at Stanford and Zurich University

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From 1963 to 1967, he served as an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University and again at the University of Zurich. Then in 1968, he became a Professor of Informatics at ETH Zürich, taking two one-year sabbaticals at Xerox PARC in California from 1977 to 1977 and 1984 to 1985. He retired in 1999 as a lecturer.

3. Wirth was a member of IFIP

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The International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) is a global organization for researchers and professionals working in the field of computing to conduct research, develop standards and promote information sharing.

Established in 1960 under the auspices of UNESCO. IFIP is recognized by the United Nations and links some 50 national and international societies and academies of science with a total membership of over half a million professionals.

Wirth was involved with developing international standards in programming and informatics. He was a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi. It specified, maintains, and supports the programming languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.

4. He became a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2004

The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history. It is located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age and explores the computing revolution and its impact on society.

It was in 2004 when Wirth was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum for seminal work in programming languages and algorithms. Some of the programming languages and algorithms include Euler, Algol-W, Pascal, Modula, and Oberon.”

5. Wirth was the chief designer of the programming languages Euler

Euler is a programming language created by Niklaus Wirth and Helmut Weber, conceived as an extension and generalization of ALGOL 60. Euler employs a general data type concept. In Euler, arrays, procedures, and switches are not quantities that are declared and named by identifiers.

Therefore, in contrast to ALGOL, they are not quantities on the same level as variables. Rather, these quantities are on the level of numeric and boolean constants. Other programming  languages include;PL360 (1966), ALGOL W in 1966, Pascal in 1970, Modula in 1975, Modula-2 in 1978, Oberon in 1987, Oberon-2 in 1991, and Oberon-07 in 2007.

6. He was a major designer of Lilith working station

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The DISER Lilith is a custom-built workstation computer based on the Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) 2901 bit slicing processor, created by a group led by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zürich. The project began in 1977, and by 1984 several hundred workstations were in use.

It has a high-resolution full-page portrait-oriented cathode ray tube display, a mouse, a laser printer interface, and a computer networking interface. Its software is written fully in Modula-2 and includes a relational database program named Lidas.

So, Wirth was a major part of the design and implementation team for the operating systems for the Lilith workstation. Other operating systems that Wirth was also a major part of the design are; Medos-2 in1983, Oberon in 1987, for the Ceres workstation, and the Lola in 1995 digital hardware design and simulation system.

7. Wirth received the Turin ward in 1954

The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science.

It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science and is colloquially known as or often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing”. So, Wirth received the highest distinction in computer science for the development of languages.

8. He is the founding father of Wirth’s law

Niklaus Wirth the founding father of Wirth’s law by Zvezdica2816 –

Wirth’s law is an adage on computer performance that states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster. The adage is named after Niklaus Wirth discussed it in his 1995 article “A Plea for Lean Software”.

9. Wirth is the writer of Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs

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Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs is a 1976 book written by Niklaus Wirth covering some of the fundamental topics of computer programming, particularly that algorithms and data structures are inherently related.

For example, if one has a sorted list one will use a search algorithm optimal for sorted lists. The book was one of the most influential computer science books of the time and, like Wirth’s other work, was extensively used in education.

10. Wirth also published a textbook called Systematic Programming: An Introduction

The textbook was considered a good source for students who wanted to do more than just coding. The cover flap of the sixth edition published in 1973 stated the book was tailored to the needs of people who view a course on systematic construction of algorithms as part of their basic mathematical training.