Kristen Nygaard
Co-inventor of object-oriented programming and Simula.
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via Wikipedia: Kristen Nygaard · see source
He was also active in Norwegian politics, serving as a member of the National Executive Committee of the Norwegian Liberal Party in the mid and late 1960s.[1] Kristen Nygaard, who lived from August 27, 1926 to August 10, 2002, is recognized globally as the person who, together with Ole-Johan Dahl, created object-oriented programming and the Simula language.[1]
Life and work
In the late sixties, the Norwegian Iron and Metal Workers Union contacted Nygaard for help with new computing technologies.[1] Nygaard and others developed courses and books about information technologies specifically for the use by workers.[1] He was also the co-creator of other important modelling and computer programming languages, including Delta and Beta.[1] During the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center (Norsk Regnesentral), Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl worked out the first concepts for object-oriented programming while creating the simulation languages Simula I (1961–1965) and Simula 67 (1965–1968).[2]
Objects, classes, inheritance, virtual quantities, and multi-threaded (quasi-parallel) program execution—these fundamental features of object-oriented programming were first brought in by those languages.[2] Nygaard belonged to the Norwegian Labour Party (Arbeiderpartiet) for three decades, from 1971 through 2001.[1] In November 2001, the IEEE gave Nygaard and Dahl the IEEE John von Neumann Medal because they introduced the ideas behind object-oriented programming by designing and implementing Simula 67.[3]
What the cited sources add
The same source states that Nygaard was a rare combination of scientist and politician.[1] A colleague recalled that Nygaard was setting up an international network to teach object-oriented programming in a new and better way to people all around the world.[1] Another contributor wrote that Nygaard was an enormous active contributor to discussions in meetings.[1] The "In Memoriam" page also includes a list of "top 10 things I learnt from Kristen," which includes the statement "SIMULA is applied mathematics".[1]
According to the "In Memoriam Kristen" page, Nygaard's campaign targeted political developments like the Maastricht Agreement, which he believed would endanger the Scandinavian welfare state, and he stated it was not a campaign against Europe.[1]
References
- In Memoriam Kristen. facts only, no text reused. kristennygaard.no
- Wikipedia, "Kristen Nygaard" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Dahl, "Common Base Language", Norwegian Computing Center, 1970, p. 1.3.1 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Kristen Nygaard" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: In Memoriam Kristen (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article Kristen Nygaard (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.
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Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Kristen Nygaard (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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