Adriaan van Wijngaarden

Adriaan "Aad" van Wijngaarden (2 November 1916 – 7 February 1987) was a Dutch mathematician and computer scientist. Trained as a mechanical engineer, Van Wijngaarden emphasized and promoted the mathematical aspects of computing, first in numerical analysis, then in programming languages and finally in design principles of such languages.

Biography Van Wijngaarden's university education was in mechanical engineering, for which he received a degree from Delft University of Technology in 1939. He then studied for a doctorate in hydrodynamics, but abandoned the field. He joined the Nationaal Luchtvaartlaboratorium in 1945 and went with a group to England the next year to learn about new technologies that had been developed there during World War II.

Van Wijngaarden was intrigued by the new idea of automatic computing. On 1 January 1947, he became the head of the Computing Department of the brand-new Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), which was at the time known as the Mathematisch Centrum (MC), in Amsterdam. for which he developed a two-level type of formal grammar that became known as a Van Wijngaarden grammar.

In 1962, he became involved with developing international standards in programming and informatics, as a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi, which specified, maintains, and supports the programming languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.

Van Wijngaarden Awards The Van Wijngaarden Awards are named in his honor and are awarded every 5 years from the 60th anniversary of the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in 2006. The physical award consists of a bronze sculpture. 2006: Computer scientist Nancy Lynch and mathematician-magician Persi Diaconis.