Peter Naur

Peter Naur was a Danish computer scientist and astronomer who earned his PhD in astronomy from the University of Copenhagen in 1957 before shifting his career toward the emerging field of computing, working at the Danish computing company Regnecentralen from 1959 to 1969 and then serving as professor of computer science at the University of Copenhagen from 1969 to 1998. Naur served as editor of the influential Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 60, and in that role he helped adapt and popularize a notation for formally describing programming language syntax that became known as Backus-Naur form, or BNF, a formalism still used to define the grammar of most programming languages today. He remains the only Danish recipient of the ACM Turing Award, which he received in 2005 for his work on defining the programming language ALGOL 60, and he was earlier honored with the Computer Pioneer Award in 1986.