Niklaus Wirth
Niklaus Wirth (1934–2024) designed a series of programming languages at ETH Zurich: Euler, PL360, Algol W, Modula, Modula-2, Oberon and LoLa, and above all Pascal, created in the 1970s.
In 1980 his group at ETH built Lilith, one of the first workstations with a high-resolution graphic display and a mouse. In 1984 Wirth received the A.M. Turing Award of the Association for Computing Machinery. He died on 1 January 2024, weeks before his 90th birthday.
The founders of applied mathematics
Eduard Stiefel founded ETH’s Institute for Applied Mathematics in 1948. Heinz Rutishauser, one of his first assistants, later led the group from which ETH’s computer science grew. The story of their machines is on The first machines.
Two Nobel Prizes in two years
IBM has run a research laboratory in Switzerland since 1956. Its researchers Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics for the scanning tunnelling microscope. A year later, Georg Bednorz and Alex Müller received the 1987 prize for discovering high-temperature superconductivity.
Sources
- ETH Zurich, Computer pioneer Niklaus Wirth has died
- ACM, Niklaus E. Wirth – A.M. Turing Award Laureate
- ETH Zurich, Department of Computer Science: Development of the department
- IBM Research Europe – Zurich, Background & historical highlights
Sources checked on: 1 November 2026