Niklaus Wirth was born on February 15, 1934 in Switzerland. He got his bachelor's and master's in Europe and his Ph. D. at UC Berkeley (1963). From Cal Dr. Wirth went on to teach computer science first at Stanford, then at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland (where he presently is.) As rp says above, Dr. Wirth is best known for the Pascal, a computer language he originally envisioned as teaching tool rather than a full-fledge production-ready language. He is also the creator of Oberon and Modula-2.

Dr. Wirth's homepage is at http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~wirth

Niklaus Wirth has become nothing less than a legend in his own time and an icon in the history of the microcomputer Though usually cited with the creation of Pascal and as the butt of many Niklaus Wirth Jokes, he is much more than that.

He was born February 15, 1934 in Winterhur, Switzerland, the son of Walter and Hedwig Wirth. His education in Electrical Engineering began with his degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1958, his M.Sc. from Canada's University Laval in 1960 and then his Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 1963.

Later he became an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University from 1963 through 1967 and then moved back to Zurich to be Professor of Informatics at ETH Zurich. He stayed in that position (barring a 2 year vacation to Xerox PARC) until his retirement in 1999.

He has received Honors including the A. M. Turing Award (1984), IEEE Computer Society, Computer Pioneer Award (1988), IBM Europe Science and Technology Prize 1988 1989), Member, Swiss Academy of Engineering (1992), US Academy of Engineering (1994), Orden Pour le merite (1996), ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award in Software Engineering (1999), Leonardo da Vinci Medal from Societe Europeenne pour la Formation des Ingenieurs (SEFI) (1999). His Honorary Doctorates include: University of York, England (1978), Ecole Polytechnique Federale, Lausanne, Switzerland (1978), Laval University, Quebec, Canada (1987), Johannes Kepler Universitaet Linz, Austria (1993), University of Novosibirsk, Russia (1996), The Open University, England (1997), University of Pretoria, South Africa (1998), Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic (1999)..

In his most noted field, computer languages, Prof. Wirth has credit for: Euler, Algol-w, Pascal(-P), Modula(-2) and Oberon, as well bit parts in a handful of others.

It's also important to address the pronunciation of his name. Although, in the western world, we would pronouce his name along the lines of

N-ik'a'lus W-e-rth
..because of his country of origin (Switzerland), it is really pronounced like (and he pronounces it as)
N-i-kl'us V-ir't
Just thought you'd all like to know. Sadly, pronouncing it this way causes a bunch of jokes to not be as funny.



this writeup is in direct retailiation for an unfair deletion. I know who you are. Do not do it again.

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