Friedrich L. Bauer


Friedrich Ludwig "Fritz" Bauer was a German computer scientist and professor at the Technical University of Munich.

Life

Bauer earned his Abitur in 1942 and served in the Wehrmacht during World War II, from 1943 to 1945. From 1946 to 1950, he studied mathematics and theoretical physics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. Bauer received his Doctor of Philosophy under the supervision of Fritz Bopp for his thesis Gruppentheoretische Untersuchungen zur Theorie der Spinwellengleichungen in 1952. He completed his habilitation thesis Über quadratisch konvergente Iterationsverfahren zur Lösung von algebraischen Gleichungen und Eigenwertproblemen in 1954 at the Technical University of Munich. After teaching as privatdozent at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität from 1954 to 1958, he became extraordinary professor for applied mathematics at the University of Mainz. Since 1963, he worked as a professor of mathematics and computer science at Technical University of Munich. He retired in 1989.
Bauer's early work involved constructing computing machinery. In this context, he was the first to propose the widely used stack method of expression evaluation.
Bauer was a member of the committees that developed the imperative computer programming languages ALGOL 58, and its successor ALGOL 60, important predecessors to all modern imperative programming languages. For ALGOL 58, Bauer was with the German Gesellschaft für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik which worked with the American Association for Computing Machinery. For ALGOL 60, Bauer was with the International Federation for Information Processing IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi, which supports and maintains the languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.
In 1968, he coined the term software engineering which has been in widespread use since, and has become a discipline in computer science.
Bauer was an influential figure in establishing computer science as an independent subject in German universities.
His scientific contributions spread from numerical analysis and fundamentals of interpretation and translation of programming languages, to his later works on systematics of program development, especially program transformation methods and systems and the associated wide-spectrum language system CIP-L. He also wrote a well-respected book on cryptology, Decrypted secrets, now in its fourth edition.
He was the doctoral advisor of 39 students, including Manfred Broy, David Gries, Manfred Paul, Gerhard Seegmüller, Josef Stoer, Peter Wynn, and Christoph Zenger.
Friedrich Bauer was married to Hildegard Bauer-Vogg. He was the father of three sons and two daughters.

Definition of software engineering

Bauer was a colleague of the German Representative the NATO Science Committee. In 1967, NATO had been discussing 'The Software Crisis' and Bauer had suggested the term 'Software Engineering' as a way to conceive of both the problem and the solution.
In 1972, Bauer published the following definition of software engineering:
"Establishment and use of sound engineering principles to economically obtain software that is reliable and works on real machines efficiently."

Awards

In 2014, the TU Munich renamed their largest lecture hall in the department of Informatics and Computer Science after Friedrich Bauer.
;Honorary doctorates

Publications

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