Nico Habermann

Arie Nicolaas Habermann (26 June 1932 to 8 August 1993), known as A.N. Habermann or Nico Habermann, was a Dutch computer scientist born in Groningen, Netherlands. He earned his BS in mathematics and physics and MS in mathematics from the Free University of Amsterdam in 1953 and 1958, and his PhD in applied mathematics from the Eindhoven University of Technology in 1967 under advisor Edsger Dijkstra. He joined Carnegie Mellon University's computer science department as a visiting research scientist in 1968, became associate professor in 1969 and full professor in 1974, served as acting department head in 1979 and department head from 1980 to 1988, and was then named Dean of the new School of Computer Science; he also cofounded Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute in 1985. His research spanned programming languages, operating systems and large software systems, including inter-process communication, process synchronization, deadlock avoidance and software verification, and the programming languages ALGOL 60, BLISS, Pascal and Ada. He also contributed to operating systems including Dijkstra's THE multiprogramming system, Carnegie Mellon's FAMOS, Berlin's DAS, and Unix. The Computing Research Association's A. Nico Habermann Award, first given in 1994, is named for him.