Klaus Samelson

Klaus Samelson was a German mathematician, physicist and computer pioneer who played a key role, alongside Friedrich L. Bauer, in the design of the ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60 programming languages as part of an international working group. Working with Bauer he recognized that a stack, a last in first out structure, should govern how a compiler translates a programming language and manages a programs run time behavior, an insight that became fundamental to how compilers and processors handle nested function calls and expressions. From 1963 he held a chair at the Technical University of Munich, where he and Bauer built one of the first university curricula in informatics and computer science.