| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
His education was in mechanical engineering, for which he received a degree from Delft University of Technology in 1939. He then studied for a doctorate in hydrodynamics, but then abandoned the area. He joined the Nationaal Luchtvaart Laboratorium in 1945 and went with a group to England the following year to learn about new technologies that had been developed there during World War II.
Van Wijngaarden was intrigued by the new idea of automatic computing, and on 1 January 1947 he became the head of the Computing Department of the brand-new Mathematisch Centrum (MC) in AmsterdamMunicipality of Amsterdam St Andrew's crosses are taken to represent these (though the crosses are even older than the motto). A popular tradition links the X's to the three threats to the city: Water, Fire and Pestilence. Alternate meanings: See Amsterda. He then made further visits to England and the United States, gathering ideas for the construction of the first Dutch computer, the ARRA , an electromechanical construction first demonstrated in 1952. In that same year, van Wijngaarden hired Edsger DijkstraEdsger Wybe Dijkstra ( Rotterdam, May 11, 1930 Nuenen, August 6, 2002) was a Dutch computer scientist. Dijkstra studied theoretical physics at the University of Leiden. He worked as a research fellow for Burroughs Corporation in the early 1970s. He worked, and they worked on software for the ARRA.
While visiting EdinburghArthur's Seat. See also for a panoramic view from Holyrood Park towards Ocean Terminal. Edinburgh (pronounced ED-in-burra ( SAMPA: ["Ed@n%b@r@])), Dun Eideann in Scottish Gaelic, is a major and historic city on the east coast of Scotland on the south shor in 1958, van Wijngaarden was seriously injured in an automobile accident in which his wife was killed. After he recovered, he focussed more on programming language research, and was one of the designers of the original ALGOLALGOL (short for ALGO rithmic L anguage) is a programming language originally developed in the mid 1950s which became the de facto standard way to report algorithms in print for almost the next 30 years. It was designed to avoid some of the perceived prob, and later ALGOL 68ALGOL 68 was conceived as a successor to the ALGOL 60 programming language, designed with the goal of a much wider scope of application and a more rigorously defined syntax and semantics. Long under-recognized (probably due to its mainly European origin),, for which he developed a two-level type of grammar that came be known as van Wijngaarden grammar s. He became the director of the MC in 1961, and remained in that post for the next twenty years.
"Aad" was in many ways an original human being: he was known for having dropped a plausible dissertation in 1945 simply because "it lacked beauty." He used a small "at" (@) sign as his personal mark. Through his work as leader of the ALGOL 68 committee, he made a deep (though belatedly recognized) contribution to the field of programming language design, definition and description.