Peter A. Wegner (August 20, 1932 – July 27, 2017) was a computer scientist who made significant contributions to both the theory of

object-oriented programming Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of ...

during the 1980s and to the relevance of the Church–Turing thesis for empirical aspects of

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

during the 1990s and present. In 2016, Wegner wrote a brief autobiography for ''Conduit'', the annual Brown University Computer Science department magazine.Peter Wegner: A Life Remarkable
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MathSciNet MathSciNet is a searchable online bibliographic database created by the American Mathematical Society in 1996. It contains all of the contents of the journal ''Mathematical Reviews'' (MR) since 1940 along with an extensive author database, links ...

Education

Wegner was educated at

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

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. He was awarded a PhD from the

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree ...

in 1968 for his book ''Programming Languages, Information Structures, and Machine Organization'', with Maurice Wilkes listed as his supervisor.

Research

The seminal work in the area of object-oriented programming is ''On Understanding Types'', which was co-authored with

Luca Cardelli Luca Andrea Cardelli, Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), is an Italian computer scientist who is a research professor at the University of Oxford in Oxford, UK. Cardelli is well known for his research in type theory and operational semantics. A ...

. On 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. In 1999, he was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art, 1st class ("Österreichisches Ehrenkreuz für Wissenschaft u. Kunst I. Klasse"), but was hit by a bus and sustained serious brain injuries when on a trip to London to receive his award. He recovered after a lengthy coma. He was the editor-in-chief of ACM Computing Surveys and of The Brown Faculty Bulletin. He was a professor at Brown University.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wegner, Peter 1932 births 2017 deaths Alumni of the University of London American computer scientists Austrian computer scientists Programming language researchers Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Recipients of the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, 1st class Brown University faculty