Biography:Peter Wegner

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Short description: American computer scientist
Peter Wegner
Born(1932-08-20)August 20, 1932[1]
Leningrad, USSR
DiedJuly 27, 2017(2017-07-27) (aged 84)[1][2]
Alma materUniversity of London[3]
AwardsFellow of the ACM  (1995)
Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, First Class  (1999)
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
InstitutionsUniversity of London
University of Cambridge
Brown University
ThesisProgramming Languages, Information Structures And Machine Organization (1968)
Doctoral advisorMaurice Wilkes[3]
Doctoral studentsWilliam Cook[3]
Websitewww.cs.brown.edu/~pw

Peter A.[4] Wegner (August 20, 1932 – July 27, 2017) was a professor of computer science at Brown University from 1969 to 1999. He made significant contributions to both the theory of object-oriented programming during the 1980s and to the relevance of the Church–Turing thesis for empirical aspects of computer science during the 1990s and present. In 2016, Wegner wrote a brief autobiography for Conduit, the annual Brown University Computer Science department magazine.[1][5][6][7][8][9]

Education

Wegner was educated at the University of Cambridge and received a Post-Graduate Diploma in Numerical Analysis and Automatic Computing in 1954, at a time when there were no PhD programs in computer science.[1] He was awarded a PhD from the University of London in 1968 for his book Programming Languages, Information Structures, and Machine Organization, with Maurice Wilkes listed as his supervisor.[10][3]

Research

Wegner's seminal work in the area of object-oriented programming is On Understanding Types,[11] which was co-authored with Luca Cardelli. On the relevance of the Church–Turing thesis, he co-authored several papers and co-edited a book Interactive Computation: the New Paradigm, which was published in 2006.

Awards

Wegner was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1995 and received the ACM Distinguished Service Award in 2000.[12] In 1999, he was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art, 1st class ("Österreichisches Ehrenkreuz für Wissenschaft u. Kunst I. Klasse"),[13][14] but was hit by a bus and sustained serious brain injuries when on a trip to London to receive his award.[15] He recovered after a lengthy coma.

He was the editor-in-chief of ACM Computing Surveys[16] and of The Brown Faculty Bulletin.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Peter Wegner: A Life Remarkable
  2. ↑ In Memoriam: Peter Wegner, 1932-2017, 27 July 2017, https://cs.brown.edu/news/2017/07/27/memoriam-peter-wegner-1932-2017/, retrieved 28 July 2017 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Peter Wegner at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. ↑ Hacker's Delight (2 ed.). Addison-Wesley – Pearson Education. 2013. pp. 477. 0-321-84268-5. ISBN 978-0-321-84268-8. 
  5. ↑ Wegner, Peter. MathSciNet
  6. ↑ {{DBLP}} template missing ID and not present in Wikidata.
  7. ↑ List of publications from Microsoft Academic
  8. ↑ {{ACM Portal}} template missing ID and not present in Wikidata.
  9. ↑ Wegner, P. (1997). "Why interaction is more powerful than algorithms". Communications of the ACM 40 (5): 80–91. doi:10.1145/253769.253801. 
  10. ↑ Wegner, Peter (1968). Programming Languages, Information Structures, and Machine Organization (PhD thesis). University of London. Archived from the original on 2013-07-03. Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
  11. ↑ Cardelli, Luca; Wegner, Peter (December 1985). "On understanding types, data abstraction, and polymorphism". ACM Computing Surveys 17 (4): 471–523. doi:10.1145/6041.6042. ISSN 0360-0300. http://lucacardelli.name/Papers/OnUnderstanding.A4.pdf. 
  12. ↑ "Peter Wegner". Association for Computing Machinery. 1995. http://fellows.acm.org/award_winners/wegner_1068550.cfm.  "For many years of generous service to ACM and the computing community, including outstanding and inspiring leadership in publications and in charting research directions for computer science."
  13. ↑ "Peter Wegner – A prominent pioneer in computer science!". Faculty of Informatics, TU Vienna. 2006. http://wit.tuwien.ac.at/events/wegner/index_en.html. 
  14. ↑ "Reply to a parliamentary question" (in de). p. 1306. http://www.parlament.gv.at/PAKT/VHG/XXIV/AB/AB_10542/imfname_251156.pdf. 
  15. ↑ Kristen Cole (1999). "Peter Wegner on the mend". George Street Journal, Brown University. http://www.brown.edu/Administration/George_Street_Journal/vol24/24GSJ07a.html. 
  16. ↑ "Peter Wegner". ACM Distinguished Service Award. 2000. http://awards.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=7291565&srt=all&aw=144&ao=DISTGSVC. 



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