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Peter Naur is a Danish pioneer in computer science and Turing award winner. His last name is the N in the BNF notation, used in the description of the syntax for most programming languages. He contributed to the creation of the ALGOL 60 programming language.
He began his career as an astronomer for which he received his PhD degree in 1957, but his encounter with computers led to a change of profession. From 1959 to 1969, he was employed at Regnecentralen, the Danish computing institute, while at the same time giving lectures at the Niels Bohr Institute and the Technical University of Denmark. From 1969 to 1998 Naur was a professor of computer science at University of Copenhagen.
His main areas of inquiry are design, structure and performance of computer programs and algorithms. Areas such as software engineering and software architecture have also been pioneered by Naur. In his book Computing: A Human Activity, which is a collection of his contributions to computer science, he rejects the formalist school of programming that view programming as a branch of mathematics. He does not like being associated with the Backus-Naur form and says that he would prefer it to be called the Backus Normal Form.
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