Celebrating Niklaus Wirth's 80th Birthday
Organised by the computer science department of ETH Zürich, this conference was a celebration of the life and work of Niklaus Wirth on the occasion of his 80th birthday.
Niklaus Wirth was a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zürich, Switzerland, from 1968 to 1999. His principal areas of contribution were programming languages and methodology, software engineering, and design of personal workstations. He designed the programming languages Algol W, Pascal, Modula-2, and Oberon, was involved in the methodologies of structured programming and stepwise refinement, and designed and built the workstations Lilith and Ceres. He published several text books for courses on programming, algorithms and data structures, and logical design of digital circuits. He has received various prizes and honorary doctorates, including the Turing Award, the IEEE Computer Pioneer, and the Award for outstanding contributions to Computer Science Education.
Invited Speakers
Several colleagues, friends, and former students of Wirth contributed talks at the symposium; the list of speakers comprising:
- Vint Cerf
- Hans Eberlé
- Michael Franz
- Bertrand Meyer
- Carroll Morgan
- Martin Odersky
- Clemens Szyperski
- Niklaus Wirth
and our special guest speaker at the evening apéro:
- Kathleen Jensen
Details of the talks are available here. The many areas of computer science they encompass indicate the extent of Wirth's legacy in research today.
Location and Date
The symposium was held as a one-day event at ETH Zürich, Switzerland (see our local information page), on:
- Thursday, 20th February 2014
Thanks to the generous support of the ETH Computer Science department, the event was free for all participants.
Slides, Video Recordings, and Photos
Slides and video recordings of the talks are available to view and download from our programme page.
Galleries of photos taken throughout the event can be found on this page.
Contact
The symposium was organised by the Chair of Software Engineering at ETH Zürich.