Börje Langefors (; 21 May 1915 – 13 December 2009) was a Swedish

engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who Invention, invent, design, build, maintain and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials. They aim to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while ...

and

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

, Emeritus Professor of Business Information Systems at the Department of Computer and Systems Science,

Stockholm University Stockholm University (SU) () is a public university, public research university in Stockholm, Sweden, founded as a college in 1878, with university status since 1960. With over 33,000 students at four different faculties: law, humanities, social ...

and

Royal Institute of Technology KTH Royal Institute of Technology (), abbreviated KTH, is a public research university in Stockholm, Sweden. KTH conducts research and education in engineering and technology and is Sweden's largest technical university. Since 2018, KTH consist ...

, Stockholm, and "one of those who made

systems development In software engineering, a software development process or software development life cycle (SDLC) is a process of planning and managing software development. It typically involves dividing software development work into smaller, parallel, or s ...

science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...

." Children: Eva Langefors and Ola Langefors. Grandchildren: Charlotte Rosenmuller, Philip Krensler, Victor Krensler, Anna Langefors Bräutigam, Per Langefors.

Biography

Langefors was born in Ystad, Sweden, in 1915, and received his training from the

, Stockholm. He started his career in Nordic Armature Factories (NAF) industries, and in 1949 he got recruited for the SAAB aircraft company. In 1965 he went to Stockholm and was stationed at the University at the Department of Mathematical Statistics. From 1967 to 1980 he was Professor of Business Information Systems at the Department of Computer and Systems Science,

and

, Stockholm. In 1974/75 he has been a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar, the Netherlands, where he completed the writing of a book "Information and Control in Organizations" on Information Systems Architecture. Furthermore, Langefors was one of the key players in founding the IFIP TC8 Technical Committee of Information Systems in 1976.Juhani Iivari and Kalle Lyytinen (1998).
Research on Information Systems Development in Scandinavia — Unity in Plurality
" In: ''Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems''. 10 (1&2), pp. 135–186. Among his former students and later colleagues in Stockholm were Janis Bubenko, Göran Goldkuhl, John Impagliazzo, Kristo Ivanov & Arne Sølvberg. In 1999 he received the

LEO Award The Leo Awards are the awards program for the British Columbia film and television industry. Held each May or June in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, the Leo Awards were founded by the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Foundation of British C ...

of the Association for Information Systems for his lifetime achievement. In commemoration of his contribution in the field of IS, a book was published with the titl
''The Infological Equation: Essays in Honor of Börje Langefors''
An annual award titled '' Börje Langeforspriset'' has been announced by th
Swedish Information Systems Academy
since 2011 for the best doctoral dissertation in Sweden.

Work

A major achievement of his work is the formulation of the 'infological equation' describing the difference between data and information as follows: I = i(D, S, t) This is a mathematical expression for the observation, that the information "I" communicated by a set of data to humans in an information system is a function "i" of the data "D", the semantic background "S", and the time interval "t" of the communication.

Publications

Langefors published numerous papers in journals, books, and archival proceedings since the 1970s.
Accessed Sept 23, 2009. Books, a selection: * 1966. ''Theoretical analysis of information systems''. Studentlitteratur, Lund. * 1975. ''Information systems architecture''. With Bo Sundgren. Petrocelli/Charter. * 1977. ''Information and Data in Systems''. With Kjell Samuelson. * 1986. ''Trends in information systems: an anthology of papers from conferences of the IFIP Technical Committee 8 "Information Systems" to commemorate their tenth anniversary''. With A. A. Verrijn Stuart and Giampio Bracchi. International Federation for Information Processing. Technical Committee for Information Systems. * 1996. ''Essays on Infology''

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Langefors, Borje 1915 births 2009 deaths Enterprise modelling experts Information systems researchers Software engineering researchers Academic staff of Stockholm University Academic staff of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology Swedish computer scientists People from Ystad