by Gerard Alberts

Building up informatica, as computer science came to be called in The Netherlands, has been an international affair. Aad van Wijngaarden, 1916 - 1987, founding father of Dutch computer science was responsible for forging international collaboration and helping to make informatics an international endeavour. His influence reached from cooperative efforts in building computers in the 1940s to Algol68, the epitome of his style of computing. CWI commemorates his 100th birthday this year.