Three well-known and important European computing scientists died
within a very short time during the summer of 2002: Edsger W. Dijkstra
from the Netherlands and Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard from
Norway. These three men, born around 1930, were among the brightest
stars of early informatics. All three were honoured with the ACM
A. M. Turing Award, by many considered the Nobel Prize of Computing,
for their work.
Dijkstra received the Turing Award as early as 1972 for being a
principal contributor in the late 1950's to the development of the
ALGOL, a high level programming language which has become a model of
clarity and mathematical rigor. Dahl and Nygaard received the Award
in 2001 for ideas fundamental to the emergence of object oriented
programming, through their design of the programming languages Simula
I and Simula 67. Dahl and Nygaard were also co-recipients of the 2002
IEEE John von Neumann Medal for the introduction of the concepts
underlying object-oriented programming through the design and
implementation of SIMULA 67.
To honour Dahl, Dijkstra, and Nygaard, the University of Klagenfurt,
Austria, established a memorial exhibition in connection with two
conferences (Euro-Par and JMLC) held in Klagenfurt at the end of
August 2003. The exhibition, which was most fittingly named People
behind Informatics, showed the evolution of the field of information
and communication technology during the lifetime of Dahl, Dijkstra,
and Nygaard, as well as their main accomplishments and places in the
history.
The University of Klagenfurt, has generously turned the exhibition
over to the Institute of Informatics at the University of Oslo. The
exhibition will be shown during ECOOP 2004 near the main conference
site in the University Library Building, Georg Sverdrups House.
A virtual exhibition, accessible to anyone, can be found on the web at
http://cs-exhibitions.uni-klu.ac.at/.
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Kristen Nygaard
Ole-Johan Dahl
(11 May 1930–6 Aug 2002)
(27 Aug 1926–10 Aug 2002)
(12 Oct 1931–29 Jun 2002)