Peter Naur

Contributor to the creation of the ALGOL 60 programming language, Naur won the 2005 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his work on defining it. In particular, his role as editor of the influential "Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 60" with its pioneering use of BNF was recognized.

His main areas of inquiry were design, structure, and performance of computer programs and algorithms. Areas such as software engineering and software architecture were also pioneered by Naur. In his book *Computing: A Human Activity* (1992), which is a collection of his contributions to computer science, he rejected the formalist school of programming that viewed programming as a branch of mathematics.

He did not like being associated with the Backus-Naur form (attributed to him by Donald Knuth) and said that he would prefer it to be called the Backus Normal Form.