Biography:Peter Wegner
Peter Wegner | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 20, 1932[1] Leningrad, USSR |
| Died | July 27, 2017 (aged 84)[1][2] |
| Alma mater | University of London[3] |
| Awards | Fellow of the ACM (1995) Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, First Class (1999) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | University of London University of Cambridge Brown University |
| Thesis | Programming Languages, Information Structures And Machine Organization (1968) |
| Doctoral advisor | Maurice Wilkes[3] |
| Doctoral students | William Cook[3] |
| Website | www |
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
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Peter Wegner: A Life Remarkable
- ↑ 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
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Peter Wegner at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ↑ Hacker's Delight (2 ed.). Addison-Wesley – Pearson Education. 2013. pp. 477. 0-321-84268-5. ISBN 978-0-321-84268-8.
- ↑ Wegner, Peter. MathSciNet
- ↑ {{DBLP}} template missing ID and not present in Wikidata.
- ↑ List of publications from Microsoft Academic
- ↑ {{ACM Portal}} template missing ID and not present in Wikidata.
- ↑ Wegner, P. (1997). "Why interaction is more powerful than algorithms". Communications of the ACM 40 (5): 80–91. doi:10.1145/253769.253801.
- ↑ 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) - ↑ 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.
- ↑ "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."
- ↑ "Peter Wegner – A prominent pioneer in computer science!". Faculty of Informatics, TU Vienna. 2006. http://wit.tuwien.ac.at/events/wegner/index_en.html.
- ↑ "Reply to a parliamentary question" (in de). p. 1306. http://www.parlament.gv.at/PAKT/VHG/XXIV/AB/AB_10542/imfname_251156.pdf.
- ↑ Kristen Cole (1999). "Peter Wegner on the mend". George Street Journal, Brown University. http://www.brown.edu/Administration/George_Street_Journal/vol24/24GSJ07a.html.
- ↑ "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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