Reinhard Wilhelm (born June 5, 1946) is a German computer scientist.
Life and work
Wilhelm was born in , today part of the municipality of
Finnentrop
Finnentrop is a ''Gemeinde'' (municipality) in Olpe district in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.
Geography
Finnentrop is situated in the Sauerland, near the forks of the rivers Bigge and Lenne. Finnentrop shares borders with Sundern and Esloh ...
,
Westphalia
Westphalia (; german: Westfalen ; nds, Westfalen ) is a region of northwestern Germany and one of the three historic parts of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It has an area of and 7.9 million inhabitants.
The territory of the regio ...
. He studied math, physics and mathematical logic at
University of Münster
The University of Münster (german: Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, WWU) is a public research university located in the city of Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany.
With more than 43,000 students and over 120 fields of stud ...
and computer science at
Technical University Munich
The Technical University of Munich (TUM or TU Munich; german: Technische Universität München) is a public research university in Munich, Germany. It specializes in engineering, technology, medicine, and applied and natural sciences.
Establis ...
and
Stanford University. He finished his PhD at TU Munich in 1977. In 1978, he obtained a professorship at
Saarland University
Saarland University (german: Universität des Saarlandes, ) is a public research university located in Saarbrücken, the capital of the German state of Saarland. It was founded in 1948 in Homburg in co-operation with France and is organized in s ...
, where he led the chair for programming languages and compiler construction until his retirement in 2014. In addition, Wilhelm has held the post of scientific director of the
Leibniz Center for Informatics
Dagstuhl is a computer science research center in Germany, located in and named after a district of the town of Wadern, Merzig-Wadern, Saarland.
Location
Following the model of the mathematical center at Oberwolfach, the center is installed in ...
at
Schloss Dagstuhl from its inception in 1990 until 2014. Today he is a professor emeritus at Saarland University.
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
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 o ...
that offers software-quality assurance tools based on
abstract interpretation, among them tools for the verification of real-time requirements, used for example for certification of the time-critical embedded systems inside the
Airbus A380
The Airbus A380 is a large wide-body airliner that was developed and produced by Airbus. It is the world's largest passenger airliner and only full-length double-deck jet airliner.
Airbus studies started in 1988, and the project was annou ...
.
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 An attribute grammar is a formal way to supplement a formal grammar with semantic information processing. Semantic information is stored in attributes associated with terminal and nonterminal symbols of the grammar. The values of attributes are resu ...
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
In logic, a three-valued logic (also trinary logic, trivalent, ternary, or trilean, sometimes abbreviated 3VL) is any of several many-valued logic systems in which there are three truth values indicating ''true'', ''false'' and some indeterminate ...
together with
Mooly Sagiv and
Tom Reps.
Wilhelm is co-author of the book ''Compiler Construction'', which teaches compilers not only 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 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 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
The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of Humanities, Letters, Law, and Sciences.
The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europea ...
) in 2008. October of the same year he was awarded an honorary doctorate of the
RWTH Aachen
RWTH Aachen University (), also known as North Rhine-Westphalia Technical University of Aachen, Rhine-Westphalia Technical University of Aachen, Technical University of Aachen, University of Aachen, or ''Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hoch ...
. In December, he obtained an honorary degree of
Tartu University
The University of Tartu (UT; et, Tartu Ülikool; la, Universitas Tartuensis) is a university in the city of Tartu in Estonia. It is the national university of Estonia. It is the only classical university in the country, and also its biggest ...
. 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
The Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (german: Verdienstorden der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or , BVO) is the only federal decoration of Germany. It is awarded for special achievements in political, economic, cultural, intellect ...
and the ''
ACM Distinguished Service Award
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...
''. In 2013 he was accepted into the German National Academy Leopoldina. He received the Test-of-Time award at the international conference ESWEEK 2019 for the long term impact of his research on execution time bounds. In 2020, the IEEE Technical Committee on Real Time Systems awarded him their Outstanding Technical Achievement and Leadership Award. In 2021, he received the Test-of-Time Award of the IEEE Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems (TCRTS) for the article "The influence of processor architecture on the design and the results of WCET tools".
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
* Reinhard Wilhelm: ''Einsichten eines Informatikers von geringem Verstande – Glossen aus dem Informatik Spektrum.'' Springer Fachmedien, Wiesbaden 2020, .
* Reinhard Wilhelm: ''Von Autopiloten, Taliban und dem Friedrichstadtpalast: Neue Einsichten eines Informatikers von geringem Verstande.'' Independently published 2022, .
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.
References
External links
Reinhard Wilhelm's home pageSummer school talk by Reinhard Wilhelm on real-time analysis*
Entry at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wilhelm, Reinhard
Members of Academia Europaea
People from Olpe (district)
German computer scientists
Technical University of Munich alumni
Academic staff of Saarland University
Recipients of the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
1946 births
Living people