Heinz Rutishauser

Heinz Rutishauser (January 30, 1918 to November 10, 1970) was a Swiss mathematician and computer scientist, born in Weinfelden and died in Zurich, regarded as a pioneer of automatic programming and one of the principal authors of the ALGOL programming language. He studied mathematics at ETH Zurich from 1936, graduating in 1942, and earned his PhD there in 1948 with a thesis on complex analysis. He worked as an assistant to Walter Saxer, then as a research associate at ETH's Institute for Applied Mathematics from 1949, collaborating on the design of the ERMETH computer, was named Privatdozent in 1951, extraordinary professor in 1955 and associate professor of applied mathematics in 1962, and later headed ETH's Group for Computer Science. His Superplan language, developed between 1949 and 1951, introduced the reserved word "fur" for loop constructs, later carried into ALGOL 58 as "for," and he took part in the January 1960 Paris conference that produced ALGOL 60.