Peter Wegner (computer scientist)
American computer scientist
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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]
Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, First Class (1999)
Peter Wegner | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 20, 1932[1] |
| 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 |
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.[9][3]
Research
Wegner's seminal work in the area of object-oriented programming is On Understanding Types,[10] 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.[11] In 1999, he was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art, 1st class ("Österreichisches Ehrenkreuz für Wissenschaft u. Kunst I. Klasse"),[12][13] but was hit by a bus and sustained serious brain injuries when on a trip to London to receive his award.[14] He recovered after a lengthy coma.
He was the editor-in-chief of ACM Computing Surveys[15] and of The Brown Faculty Bulletin.
