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The following text has been machine translated from the German with no human editing.
Born in Deutmecke, Westphalia, Professor Dr Dr h.c. Reinhard Wilhelm studied mathematics, physics and mathematical logic at the University of Münster from 1965 to 1972, as well as computer science at the Technical University of Munich and Stanford University. In 1977, he obtained his doctorate at the Technical University of Munich with a thesis supervised by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Eickel. In 1978, he accepted a post at Saarland University, where a research focus on computer science had been established since the early 1970s, and held the Chair of Programming Languages and Compiler Construction until his retirement in 2014. At the same time, from 1990 to 2014, he served as the founding director of the internationally renowned International Centre for Computer Science, based at Schloss Dagstuhl – now the Leibniz Centre for Computer Science. In 1998, the company AbsInt Angewandte Informatik was spun off, specialising in the development of tools for software quality assurance.
In his projects and publications, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the European Union, among others, the honouree has devoted himself to the fields of programming languages, compiler construction, static programme analysis, embedded systems, real-time analysis and the visualisation of algorithms and data structures. Professor Wilhelm has co-developed compiler generators and initiated software tools for verifying real-time analyses. Among other things, he is a co-founder of the ‘European Symposium on Programming (ESOP)’ and the ‘European- -Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS)’, has been extensively active within the scientific community and, for example, has taken on leading roles within the ‘Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)’. Last but not least, he is a member of the “Academia Europaea” and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
Visiting professorships and research stays have taken the honouree to, among others, the University of California, Berkeley, USA (1983), the Hebrew University and the IBM Israel Scientific Centre (1986), the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, USA (1989), the École Normale Supérieure, Paris (1999 and 2008) and to Grenoble (2008 and 2009).
His wide-ranging achievements have been recognised with prestigious awards, honours and prizes. The recipient of the Federal Cross of Merit on Ribbon, an honorary doctorate from RWTH Aachen University and the University of Tartu, has also been awarded, among other honours, the Alwin Walther Medal from Darmstadt Technical University and the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics, the Gay-Lussac-Humboldt Prize, and the Konrad Zuse Medal from the German Informatics Society. Further honours were bestowed by the New York-based “Association for Computing Machinery”, the IEEE Computer Society in Washington D.C., and most recently in 2025 with the “ACM SIGBED Technical Achievement Award”.
Kontakt:
Dr. Wolfgang Müller, Universitätsarchiv
wolfgang.mueller@uni-saarland.de
