For other people with the same name, see Peter Wegner (disambiguation).

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.[2][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.[2] 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][1]

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. ^ a b c d Peter Wegner at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ^ a b c d Peter Wegner: A Life Remarkable
  3. ^ In Memoriam: Peter Wegner, 1932-2017, 27 July 2017, retrieved 28 July 2017
  4. ^ Warren, Jr., Henry S. (2013) [2002]. Hacker's Delight (2 ed.). Addison-Wesley – Pearson Education. p. 477. ISBN 978-0-321-84268-8. 0-321-84268-5.
  5. ^ Wegner, Peter. MathSciNet
  6. ^ Peter Wegner at DBLP Bibliography Server Edit this at Wikidata
  7. ^ Peter Wegner publications indexed by Microsoft Academic
  8. ^ Peter Wegner author profile page at the ACM Digital Library Edit this at Wikidata
  9. ^ Wegner, P. (1997). "Why interaction is more powerful than algorithms". Communications of the ACM. 40 (5): 80–91. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.57.9269. doi:10.1145/253769.253801. S2CID 11605796.
  10. ^ Wegner, Peter (1968). Programming Languages, Information Structures, and Machine Organization (PhD thesis). University of London. Archived from the original on 2013-07-03.
  11. ^ Cardelli, Luca; Wegner, Peter (December 1985). "On understanding types, data abstraction, and polymorphism" (PDF). ACM Computing Surveys. 17 (4): 471–523. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.117.695. doi:10.1145/6041.6042. ISSN 0360-0300. S2CID 2921816.
  12. ^ "Peter Wegner". Association for Computing Machinery. 1995. Retrieved 2017-07-29. "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."
  13. ^ "Peter Wegner – A prominent pioneer in computer science!". Faculty of Informatics, TU Vienna. 2006. Retrieved 2009-10-03.
  14. ^ "Reply to a parliamentary question" (PDF) (in German). p. 1306. Retrieved 24 November 2012.
  15. ^ Kristen Cole (1999). "Peter Wegner on the mend". George Street Journal, Brown University. Archived from the original on 2006-09-19. Retrieved 2009-10-03.
  16. ^ "Peter Wegner". ACM Distinguished Service Award. 2000. Archived from the original on 2012-05-04. Retrieved 2009-10-03.