Peter Wegner

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Peter A. Wegner (born August 20, 1932 in Leningrad , † July 27, 2017 in Providence (Rhode Island) ) was an American computer scientist.

Wegner was born in Leningrad to Austrian parents and grew up in Vienna, which he left in 1938 on one of the Kindertransporte . He went to school in London and studied mathematics at Imperial College London and Cambridge University, graduating in 1954. At that time you could not do a doctorate there in computer science, which he did not do until 1968 at the University of London with Maurice Wilkes (dissertation: Programming Languages, Information Structures, and Machine Organization). He was working with Wilkes on the EDSAC computer as early as the mid-1950s . After graduating from Cambridge, he was with Prudential Insurance Company, Pennsylvania State University , MIT , where he worked with Fernando Corbato on the Multics project, the London School of Economics and Cornell University . He was a professor at Brown University , where he had been since 1969.

Among other things, he dealt with object-oriented programming, the computer-human interface (interactive computing) and philosophical problems ( Church-Turing thesis ).

In 1968 he was editor of the ACM's curriculum recommendations for computer science. He was the editor of the ACM Computing Surveys and the Brown Faculty Bulletin.

He was a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery . In 1999 he received the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art, 1st class .

Fonts (selection)

  • Editor: Introduction to system programming: proceedings of a symposium held at the London School of Economics, July 1962, Academic Press 1964
  • An introduction to symbolic programming, London: Griffin 1966
  • Programming Languages, Information Structures, and Machine Organization, McGraw Hill 1968, 1971
  • with Luca Cardelli: On Understanding Types, Data Abstraction and Polymorphism, ACM Computing Surveys, Volume 17, 1985, pp. 471-523
  • with Bruce Shriver: Research Directions in Object-Oriented Programming, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 1987
  • Why Interaction Is More Powerful Than Algorithms, Communications of the ACM., May 1997
  • Computation Beyond Turing Machines, Communications of the ACM, April 2003
  • with Eugene Eberbach, Dina Goldin: Turing's Ideas and Models of Computation, in: Christof Teuscher (Ed.), Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker, Springer 2004
  • The Church-Turing Thesis: Breaking the Myth, CiE 2005, Amsterdam, LNCS 3526, Springer 2005, pp. 152–168
  • with Dina Goldin, Scott A. Smolka: Interactive Computation: the New Paradigm, Springer 2006

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. List of winners of the Medal of Honor for Services to the Republic of Austria . Retrieved July 6, 2018.