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.
^"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."