work_institution birth_place image_size nationality field birth_date known_for prizes image article_title name
regnecentralen of copenhagen niels bohr institute technical university of denmark university frederiksberg , denmark 150px danish computer science 25 october 1928 algol , backus -- naur form computer 2005 -rrb- pioneer award -lrb- 1986 -rrb- turing award -lrb- peternaur.jpg peter naur
 peter naur
peter naur

peter naur -lrb- born 25 october 1928 -rrb- is a danish pioneer in computer science and turing award winner .
his last name is the n in the bnf notation -lrb- backus-naur form -rrb- , used in the description of the syntax for most programming languages .
he contributed to the creation of the algol 60 programming language .
he began his career as an astronomer for which he received his phd degree in 1957 , but his encounter with computers led to a change of profession .
from 1959 to 1969 , he was employed at regnecentralen , the danish computing institute , while at the same time giving lectures at the niels bohr institute and the technical university of denmark .
from 1969 to 1998 naur was a professor of computer science at university of copenhagen .
his main areas of inquiry are design , structure and performance of computer programs and algorithms .
areas such as software engineering and software architecture have also been pioneered by naur .
in his book `` computing : a human activity '' -lrb- 1992 -rrb- , which is a collection of his contributions to computer science , he rejects the formalist school of programming that view programming as a branch of mathematics .
he does not like being associated with the backus-naur form -lrb- attributed to him by donald knuth -rrb- and says that he would prefer it to be called the `` backus normal form '' .
naur was married to computer scientist christiane floyd .
naur dislikes the very term `` computer science '' and suggests it be called `` datalogy '' or data science .
the former term has been adopted in denmark and in sweden as `` datalogi '' , while the latter term is now used for data analysis -lrb- including statistics and databases -rrb- .
in later years he has also been quite outspoken of the pursuit of science as a whole : naur can possibly be identified with the empiricist school , that tells that one shall not seek deeper connections between things that manifest themselves in the world , but keep to the observable facts .
he has attacked both certain strands of philosophy and psychology from this viewpoint .
he is also currently developing a theory of human thinking which he calls synapse-state theory of mental life .
naur won the 2005 acm a.m. turing award for his work on defining the algol 60 programming language .
in particular , his role as editor of the influential `` report on the algorithmic language algol 60 '' with its pioneering use of bnf was recognized .
naur is the only dane to have won the turing award .
