Life and work

Wilhelm was born in Deutmecke, Westphalia

Westphalia

Westphalia is a region in Germany, centred on the cities of Arnsberg, Bielefeld, Dortmund, Minden and Münster.Westphalia is roughly the region between the rivers Rhine and Weser, located north and south of the Ruhr River. No exact definition of borders can be given, because the name "Westphalia"...

. He studied math, physics and mathematical logic at University of Münster

University of Münster

The University of Münster is a public university located in the city of Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. The WWU is part of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, a society of Germany's leading research universities...

 and computer science at Technical University Munich and Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

. He finished his PhD at TU Munich in 1977. In 1978, he obtained a professorship at Saarland University

Saarland University

Saarland University is a university located in Saarbrücken, the capital of the German state of Saarland, and Homburg. It was founded in 1948 in Homburg in co-operation with France and is organized in 8 faculties that cover all major fields of science...

 where he leads the chair for programming languages and compiler construction until today. In addition, Wilhelm has held the post of scientific director of the Leibniz Center for Informatics at Schloss Dagstuhl since its inception in 1990.

Wilhelm is one of the co-founders of the European Symposium on Programming (ESOP) and the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS). The European Association for Programming Languages (EAPLS) goes back to his idea to found an organization for advancing research on programming languages and programming systems. In 1998, he founded AbsInt, a research spin-off

Research spin-off

A research spin-off is a company that falls into at least one of the four following categories:#Companies that have an equity investment from a national library or university#Companies that license technology from a public research institute or university...

 that offers software for verification of time-critical properties of embedded systems, used for example for certification of the time-critical systems inside the Airbus A380

Airbus A380

The Airbus A380 is a double-deck, wide-body, four-engine jet airliner manufactured by the European corporation Airbus, a subsidiary of EADS. It is the largest passenger airliner in the world. Due to its size, many airports had to modify and improve facilities to accommodate it...

.

Wilhelm's research focuses on programming languages, compiler construction, static program analysis and embedded real time systems, but also includes animation and visualization of algorithms and data structures. Wilhelm discovered connections between code selection and the theory of regular tree automata, which is relevant for code generation using tree automata. He is one of the co-developers of the MUG1, MUG2 and OPTRAN compiler generators, which are based on attribute grammar

Attribute grammar

An attribute grammar is a formal way to define attributes for the productions of a formal grammar, associating these attributes to values. The evaluation occurs in the nodes of the abstract syntax tree, when the language is processed by some parser or compiler....

s. Together with Ulrich Möncke, he proposed grammar flow analysis as a generalization of interprocedural data flow analysis. He invented a popular shape analysis based on three-valued logic together with Mooly Sagiv and Tom Reps.

Wilhelm is co-author of the book Compiler Construction which teaches not only compilers for imperative languages, but for object oriented, functional and logical ones as well and stresses theoretical foundation. It is available in German and French, too.

Wilhelm became a fellow of the ACM

Association for Computing Machinery

The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

 in 2000 for his research on compiler construction and program analysis and his work as a scientific director of the LZI. The TU Darmstadt and the Fraunhofer-Institut für Graphische Datenverarbeitung awarded him with the Alwin-Walther medal in 2006. In 2007 the French Ministry of Education and Research awarded him with the Gay-Lussac-Humboldt prize for his contributions to science and his achievements in German–French cooperation in research and education. He became a member of the European academy of sciences (Academia Europaea

Academia Europaea

Academia Europæa is a European non-governmental scientific academy founded in 1988. Its members are scientists and scholars who collectively aim to promote learning, education and research. It publishes European Review through Cambridge Journals....

) in 2008. October of the same year he was awarded an honorary doctorate of the RWTH Aachen

RWTH Aachen

RWTH Aachen University is a research university located in Aachen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany with roughly 33,000 students enrolled in 101 study programs....

. In December, he obtained an honorary degree of Tartu university. In September 2009, he was awarded the Konrad-Zuse medal for his achievements in research and education with respect to compiler construction, real time analysis of programs and his service as scientific director of the LZI/Schloss Dagstuhl. In 2010 he was awarded the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and the ACM Distinguished Service Award.
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List of books

• Jacques Loeckx, Kurt Mehlhorn, Reinhard Wilhelm: Foundations of Programming Languages 1989
• Reinhard Wilhelm: Informatics - 10 Years Back. 10 Years Ahead. Springer 2001
• Reinhard Wilhelm, Helmut Seidl: Compiler Design: Virtual Machines, Springer 2011
• Helmut Seidl, Reinhard Wilhelm, Sebastian Hack: Compiler Design: Analysis and Transformation, Springer 2011
• Helmut Seidl, Reinhard Wilhelm, Sebastian Hack: Compiler Design: Syntactic and Semantic Analysis, Springer 2011

Literature

• Thomas Reps, Mooly Sagiv, Jörg Bauer: An Appreciation of the Work of Reinhard Wilhelm. Program Analysis and Compilation, Theory and Practice (Springer, 2007), Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 4444.

External links

• Reinhard Wilhelm's home page
• List of papers (DBLP
  DBLP
  DBLP is a computer science bibliography website hosted at Universität Trier, in Germany. It was originally a database and logic programming bibliography site, and has existed at least since the 1980s. DBLP listed more than 1.3 million articles on computer science in January 2010...
  
  )