Charles Simonyi

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Charles Simonyi
Charles Simonyi
Charles Simonyi, 2006
Country: USA / Hungary
Organization: Private
selected on April 2006
Calls: 2 space flights
Start of the
first space flight: 		April 7, 2007
Landing of the
last space flight: 		April 8, 2009
Time in space: 26d 14h 27min
retired on April 2009
Space flights

Charles Simonyi (born Károly Simonyi in Budapest on September 10, 1948 ) is a Hungarian-American computer scientist . He is known as the father of the so-called Hungarian notation , a convention for naming variables . He later played a leading role in the development of several Microsoft Office programs . He also made headlines with his flights as a space tourist to the International Space Station (ISS) in April 2007 and March 2009.

education

Charles Simonyi was born in Hungary in 1948 as the son of Károly Simonyi (1916–2001; professor of electrical engineering and author of the standard works of theoretical electrical engineering and cultural history of physics ). In 1966 he emigrated from Hungary. He first came to Denmark , worked for a year and a half as a programmer in a data center in Copenhagen and finally moved to the United States. He studied technical mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) and earned a bachelor's degree in 1972 .

Simonyi then temporarily followed his former UCB professor Butler W. Lampson to Berkeley Computer Corporation until both finally found employment in the research laboratory of the copier manufacturer Xerox in Palo Alto, California ( Xerox PARC ). Simonyi developed the word processing program Bravo in 1974 with Lampson as the chief scientist of the Computer Science Laboratory . This editor ran on Xerox's own Alto computer and offered WYSIWYG capabilities for the first time . Bravo allowed text to be captured and edited and displayed as a graphic on the screen before printing.

Simonyi continued his studies alongside his Xerox work. He studied computer science at Stanford University and received his doctorate in 1977. His dissertation dealt with the metaprogramming he developed . This should make the development of computer programs more effective by writing parts of the software itself.

Simonyi stayed with Xerox for a few years before moving to the young software company Microsoft in 1981 . IBM had just unveiled its first personal computer using Microsoft's MS-DOS operating system . Simonyi took on US citizenship the following year and built up the developer group for application programs at Microsoft. Among other things, the first versions of the spreadsheets Multiplan and Excel as well as the word processor Word were created under his leadership .

In 1991 Simonyi established Microsoft Research, the world's first department of a software company that conducts its own basic research and today has 700 employees. Here he dealt with his concept of intentional programming . In 2002 he left the group and founded the company Intentional Software in order to realize the idea of ​​intentional programming.

In May 1995, Simonyi donated £ 1.5 million to Oxford University to create a professorship. This should help to broaden the scientific understanding of the public inside and outside the university. At Simonyi's request, Richard Dawkins was to accept this professorship at the Museum of Natural History. Until he resigned in 2008, the British zoologist held the title "Charles Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science".

Simonyi was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008.

Space tourist

In April 2006 Simonyi announced his plan to fly to the International Space Station (ISS) as a space tourist . It took off on April 7, 2007 on board the Soyuz TMA-10 and landed on April 21, 2007 after a two-week stay on the ISS with the Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft .

The start of his second space trip with the Soyuz TMA-14 was on March 26, 2009. This made Simonyi the first space tourist to undertake a second flight. The landing took place on April 8, 2009 with Soyuz TMA-13 .

Private

Simonyi had been in a relationship with Martha Stewart for years since the 90s , but suddenly married the much younger Swede Lisa Persdotter (28) in November 2008. He has two daughters.

In 2008, he was ranked 1014 on Forbes Magazine's world rankings of billionaires . In 2019, he ranked 775 with an estimated net worth of $ 3.5 billion.

See also

Web links

Commons : Charles Simonyi  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Oxford University: The Simonyi Professorship Home Page (English)
  2. ↑ Business Insider
  3. ↑ Forbes: Charles Simonyi (English)
  4. ↑ Forbes: # 775 Charles Simonyi , accessed June 17, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Simonyi, Charles
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Simonyi, Károly (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian-American computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH September 10, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest