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Kristen Nygaard
Computer scientist

Kristen Nygaard

Famoose for

Co-developing Simula and the foundations of object-oriented programming.

Simula · BETA

Born
27 August 1926
Birthplace
Oslo
Died
10 August 2002

More people

Ada LovelaceRecognising what a programmable machine could do beyond arithmetic.Alan TuringHelping break Enigma and laying foundations for computer science.Grace HopperHelping make computer programming readable in English-like language.

Kristen Nygaard

Kristen Nygaard was a Norwegian computer scientist who developed Simula with Ole-Johan Dahl and shared the 2001 Turing Award.

Early life

Education

Studied mathematics at the University of Oslo, completing a master’s thesis on Monte Carlo methods in 1956.

Career

  1. 1948–1960

    Defence research

    Worked in computing and operations research.

  2. 1960

    Norwegian Computing Center

    Joined the institute and became research director in 1962.

  3. 1970s

    Systems development

    Researched computing’s effects on work and organisations.

Contributions

Simula

Co-developed languages that introduced influential object-oriented concepts.

BETA

Helped develop another object-oriented language.

Beyond research

Family

Married Johanna in 1951; they had three children.

Sources & photo creditBiography and career ↗Biographical references ↗

Original photograph. Cropped and displayed in monochrome.

Photo: Jorge Stolfi. Public domain · Original image. Cropped and displayed in monochrome.