Friedrich L. Bauer

Friedrich Ludwig Bauer (1924 to 2015), known as Fritz Bauer, was a German pioneer of computer science and professor at the Technical University of Munich. He studied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Munich, took his doctorate there in 1952, and became a professor of mathematics and later of computer science at Munich. His early work built computing machinery such as the relay computer Stanislaus, and he was the first to propose the stack method of expression evaluation. He sat on the committees that developed the programming languages ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60, and in 1968 he coined the term software engineering. His scientific contributions range from numerical analysis, including the Bauer-Fike theorem on eigenvalue perturbation, to program transformation and cryptology. He was doctoral advisor to 39 students and helped establish computer science as an independent subject in German universities.