Klaus Samelson Explained

Klaus Samelson
Birth Date:21 December 1918
Birth Place:Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine
Citizenship:Germany
Fields:Computer science
Workplaces:Mathematical Institute, Technical University of Munich
Education:Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Ph.D., 1951)
Thesis Title:Remarks on the Theory of Unipolar Induction and Related Effects
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Thesis Year:1951
Doctoral Advisor:Friedrich Bopp
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Klaus Samelson (21 December 1918 – 25 May 1980) was a German mathematician, physicist, and computer pioneer in the area of programming language translation and push-pop stack algorithms for sequential formula translation on computers.

Early life

He was born in Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine, and he lived in Breslau in his early childhood years. His elder brother was the mathematician Hans Samelson. Due to political circumstances, he waited until 1946 to study mathematics and physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Munich.

Career

After graduating, he worked briefly as a high school teacher before he returned to university. In 1951, he completed his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in physics with Friedrich Bopp (Fritz) with a dissertation on a quantum mechanics problem posed by Arnold Sommerfeld related to unipolar induction.

Samelson became interested in numerical analysis, and when Hans Piloty, an electrical engineer, and Robert Sauer, a professor of mathematics, began working together, he joined and got involved in early computers as a research associate in the Mathematical Institute of the Technical University of Munich.

This changed his scientific career. His first publications came from Sauer's interests dealing with supersonic speed flow and precision problems of digital computations for numerical calculations of eigenvalues.

Soon after, Samelson's strong influence began on the development of Computer Science and Informatics as a new scientific discipline. With Friedrich L. Bauer, who also had Fritz Bopp as his Ph.D. advisor, he studied the structure of programming languages to develop efficient algorithms for their translation and implementation. This research led to bracketed structures and it became clear to Samelson that this principle should govern the translation of programming languages and the run-time system with stack models and block structure. It was a fundamental breakthrough in how computer systems are modeled and designed.

Piloty, Bauer and Samelson had also worked on the design of PERM, a computer based partly on the Whirlwind I concept. By 1955, the PERM was completed and they continued work that Bauer had begun in 1951 on concepts in automatic programming.

Samelson was involved with international standards in programming and informatics, and played a key role in the design of ALGOLs 58 and 60, as a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi, which specified, supports, and maintains the programming languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.

In 1958, he accepted a chair for mathematics at the University of Mainz, and since 1963 he held a chair at the Technical University of Munich where he and Bauer, began to develop a university curriculum for informatics and computer science. He became an editor of the journal Acta Informatica when it began in 1971.

Selected publications

Further reading

External links

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