Ursula Goltz is a German computer scientist,

professor emerita ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

at the

Technical University of Braunschweig The Technische Universität Braunschweig (unofficially University of Braunschweig – Institute of Technology), commonly referred to as TU Braunschweig, is the oldest ' (comparable to an institute of technology in the American system) in Germany. ...

, formerly affiliated with the Institute for Programming and Reactive Systems there, and former coordinator of a

German Research Foundation The German Research Foundation (german: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft ; DFG ) is a German research funding organization, which functions as a self-governing institution for the promotion of science and research in the Federal Republic of Germ ...

program on long-lasting software systems. Her research concerns the theory of

concurrent computing Concurrent computing is a form of computing in which several computations are executed '' concurrently''—during overlapping time periods—instead of ''sequentially—''with one completing before the next starts. This is a property of a syst ...

, including the use of

Petri net A Petri net, also known as a place/transition (PT) net, is one of several mathematical modeling languages for the description of distributed systems. It is a class of discrete event dynamic system. A Petri net is a directed bipartite graph that ...

s to model concurrent systems. Goltz earned her Ph.D. at

RWTH Aachen University 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 1988, with the dissertation, ''Über die Darstellung von CCS-Programmen durch Petrinetze''. In the theory of concurrent systems, she is known for introducing the concept of action refinement, an analogue of

Niklaus Wirth Niklaus Emil Wirth (born 15 February 1934) is a Swiss computer scientist. He has designed several programming languages, including Pascal (programming language), Pascal, and pioneered several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984, he w ...

's concept of stepwise refinement in the development of software systems, together with Rob van Glabbeek. She is also one of the developers of Arden2ByteCode, a compiler for the

Arden syntax Arden syntax is a markup language used for representing and sharing medical knowledge. This clinical and scientific knowledge language is used in an executable format by clinical decision support systems to generate alerts, interpretations, and to ...

for representing medical knowledge.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Goltz, Ursula Year of birth missing (living people) Living people German computer scientists German women computer scientists RWTH Aachen University alumni Academic staff of the Technical University of Braunschweig