Heinz Rutishauser


Heinz Rutishauser was a Swiss mathematician and a pioneer of modern numerical mathematics and computer science.

Life

Heinz Rutishauser's father died when he was 13 years old and his mother died three years later, so together with his younger brother and sister he went to live in their uncle's home. From 1936, Rutishauser studied mathematics at the ETH Zürich where he graduated in 1942. From 1942 to 1945, he was assistant of Walter Saxer at the ETH, and from 1945 to 1948, a mathematics teacher in Glarisegg and Trogen. In 1948, he received his Doctor of Philosophy from ETH with a well-received thesis on complex analysis.
From 1948 to 1949, Rutishauser was in the United States at the Universities of Harvard and Princeton to study the state of the art in computing. From 1949 to 1955, he was a research associate at the Institute for Applied Mathematics at ETH Zürich recently founded by Eduard Stiefel, where he worked together with Ambros Speiser on developing the first Swiss computer ERMETH, and developed the programming language Superplan, the name being a reference to Rechenplan, in Konrad Zuse's terminology, designating a single Plankalkül program. He contributed especially in the field of compiler pioneering work and was eventually involved in defining the languages ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60. He was a member of the International Federation for Information Processing IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi, which supports and maintains ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.
Among other contributions, he introduced several basic syntactic features to computer programming, notably the reserved word for for a for loop, first as the German in Superplan, next via its English translation for in ALGOL 58.
In 1951, Rutishauser became a lecturer; in German, a Privatdozent. In 1955, he was appointed extraordinary professor, and 1962, Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics at the ETH. In 1968, he became the head of the Group for Computer Science which later became the Computer Science Institute and ultimately in 1981, The Division of Computer Science at ETH Zürich.
At least since the 1950s Rutishauser suffered from heart problems. In 1964, he suffered a heart attack from which he recovered. On 10 November 1970, he died in his office from acute heart failure. After his untimely death, his wife Margaret shepherded the publication of his posthumous works.

Papers

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