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