Peter Wegner

Peter Wegner, of Providence; July 27, following a brief illness. At the University of Cambridge he worked on the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator computer, the first practical general-purpose stored program electronic computer. In 1954 he briefly worked in the computer science department of Manchester Univ. before visiting Israel for an academic year. He returned to England in 1955 and was hired by Prudential Insurance to develop actuarial software. He left Prudential in 1956 for CAV Aerospace, where he worked on airline programming. He then held a position at Penn State Univ., where he spent two years before moving to MIT to work on the Multiplexed Information and Computing Service Project. In 1960 he moved to the mathematical laboratory of Harvard, helping faculty with their programming requirements, but he returned to England in 1961 to take on a lectureship at the London School of Economics, teaching economists about computing. He spent three years there before returning to the U.S. to be assistant professor in the mathematics department at Penn State. In 1969 he joined the Brown faculty and spent the rest of his career at Brown. In March 2017 he received a recognition award celebrating his sustained and dedicated work as editor of the Brown University Faculty Bulletin. He wrote or co-edited more than a dozen books on programming languages and software engineering. His most recent book, Interactive Computation: The New Paradigm, was published in 2008.