"What an absolutely cool guy " --- Dennis Shasha, NYU "Fascinating... very worthwhile" --- Robert Harper, CMU What mathematical rigor has and has not to offer to software engineers. Peter Naur wrote his first research paper at the age of 16. Soon an internationally acclaimed astronomer, Naur's expertise in numerical analysis gave him access to computers from 1950. He helped design and implement the influential ALGOL programming language. During the 1960s, Naur was in sync with the research agendas of McCarthy, Dijkstra, and others. By 1970, however, he had distanced himself from them. Instead...

Donald E. Knuth lived two separate lives in the late 1950s. During daylight he ran down the visible and respectable lane of mathematics. During nighttime, he trod the unpaved road of computer programming and compiler writing. Both roads intersected -- as Knuth discovered while reading Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures on his honeymoon in 1961. "Chomsky's theories fascinated me, because they were mathematical yet they could also be understood with my programmer's intuition. It was very curious because otherwise, as a mathematician, I was doing integrals or maybe was learning about...

Michael A. Jackson is fascinated by the fundamental question: What is software engineering? Jackson reflects on the constituents of software development. He contrasts the views of Edsger Dijkstra, Tony Hoare, Donald Knuth, Peter Naur, David Parnas, Christopher Strachey, Pamela Zave, and others. Some of the many interrelated topics that come to the fore are software malleability, program transformation systems, and the history of automobile engineering.