Peter Naur
Peter Naur ( born October 25, 1928 in Frederiksberg in Copenhagen ) is a Danish computer science pioneer and Turing award winner. He was name-giving in the development of BNF notation ( Backus -Naur Form ), which is used in the description of the syntax of many programming languages involved. He also participated in the development of the programming language Algol 60.
Career
He began his career as an astronomer. Already during his school years, he developed his interest in astronomy and helped in the Copenhagen University Observatory in the calculation of comets and planetary orbits. From 1947 he studied at the University of Copenhagen in 1949 and received his diploma. From 1950 to 1953 he held various research trips to England and the USA. From 1953 to 1959 he was again a research assistant in Copenhagen, where he received his doctorate in 1957. During this time he also worked as a consultant at Regnecentralen ( RC), a Danish computer manufacturer who developed the first Danish computer. His encounter with computers, therefore, led to a change in his or her field. From 1959 to 1969 he was employed by Regnecentralen. There, he worked on high-level languages and became so involved in the development of Algol 60. At the same time he lectured at the Niels Bohr Institute and Technical University of Denmark. From 1969 to 1998 he was a professor of computer science at the University of Copenhagen.
Naur coined the term Data Fallot, which was taken over in most Scandinavian countries instead of computer science or computer science ( in Denmark and Sweden as datalogi ).
Research
His main research interests are design, structure and performance of computer programs and algorithms. He was also a pioneer in areas such as software engineering and software architecture. In his book, Computing: A Human Activity ( 1992), which is a collection of his contributions to computer science, he attacks the formalist school of programming as a branch of mathematics. He may be reluctant to be associated with the Backus- Naur form ( this was done by Donald Knuth ), and he says that he would prefer to call them Backus normal form.
In later years Naur has dealt with the scientific community as a whole. He probably can be expected for the empirical school, which states that one should not seek deeper connections between things, when in fact manifest in the world, but that you should refer to observable facts. From this point of view he has tackled some directions of philosophy and psychology.
Private life
Peter Naur was married several times - including Christiane Floyd - and is the father of four children. He loves classical music.