The Most Famous
COMPUTER SCIENTISTS from Switzerland
This page contains a list of the greatest Swiss Computer Scientists. The pantheon dataset contains 201 Computer Scientists, 3 of which were born in Switzerland. This makes Switzerland the birth place of the 13th most number of Computer Scientists behind Netherlands and Greece.
Top 3
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Swiss Computer Scientists of all time. This list of famous Swiss Computer Scientists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.
1. Niklaus Wirth (1934 - 2024)
With an HPI of 62.85, Niklaus Wirth is the most famous Swiss Computer Scientist. His biography has been translated into 50 different languages on wikipedia.
Niklaus Emil Wirth (15 February 1934 – 1 January 2024) was a Swiss computer scientist. He designed several programming languages, including Pascal, and pioneered several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984, he won the Turing Award, generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science, "for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages".
2. Erich Gamma (1961 - )
With an HPI of 38.55, Erich Gamma is the 2nd most famous Swiss Computer Scientist. His biography has been translated into 18 different languages.
Erich Gamma is a Swiss computer scientist and one of the four co-authors (referred to as "Gang of Four") of the software engineering textbook, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Gamma is an expert in the Eclipse Java development editor, and with Kent Beck he co-wrote the JUnit software testing framework which helped create Test-Driven Development and influenced the whole software industry. He also led the design of the Eclipse platform's Java Development Tools (JDT), and worked on the IBM Rational Jazz project. In 2011 he joined the Microsoft Visual Studio team and leads a development lab in Zürich, Switzerland that has developed the "Monaco" suite of components for browser-based development, found in products such as Azure DevOps Services (formerly Visual Studio Team Services and Visual Studio Online), Visual Studio Code, Azure Mobile Services, Azure Web Sites, and the Office 365 Development tools.
3. Martin Odersky (1958 - )
With an HPI of 35.34, Martin Odersky is the 3rd most famous Swiss Computer Scientist. His biography has been translated into 15 different languages.
Martin Odersky (born 5 September 1958) is a German computer scientist and professor of programming methods at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. He specializes in code analysis and programming languages. He spearheaded the design of Scala and Generic Java (and Pizza before). In 1989, he received his Ph.D. from ETH Zurich under the supervision of Niklaus Wirth, who is best known as the designer of several programming languages, including Pascal. He did postdoctoral work at IBM and Yale University. In 1997, he implemented the GJ compiler, and his implementation became the basis of javac, the Java compiler. In 2002, he and others began working on Scala which had its first public release in 2003. In 2007, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. On 12 May 2011, Odersky and collaborators launched Typesafe Inc. (renamed Lightbend Inc., February 2016 (2016-02)), a company to provide commercial support, training, and services for Scala. He teaches three courses on the Coursera online learning platform: Functional Programming Principles in Scala, Functional Program Design in Scala and Programming Reactive Systems.
Pantheon has 3 people classified as computer scientists born between 1934 and 1961. Of these 3, 2 (66.67%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living computer scientists include Erich Gamma and Martin Odersky. The most famous deceased computer scientists include Niklaus Wirth. As of April 2022, 1 new computer scientists have been added to Pantheon including Martin Odersky.
