Prof. em. Dr. Jürg Gutknecht

Jürg Gutknecht is Professor of Computer Science at the ETH Zurich. As Dean of the Informatics Department in 1995 he pioneered the US-type credit system at ETH.

Prof. Gutknecht was born in Bülach ZH on January 3, 1949. From 1967 to 1970 he was a member of the real-time system programming group at Swissair. From 1970 to 1974 he studied mathematics at the ETH and simultaneously worked at IBM as a student employee. In 1978 he received his doctorate with a dissertation on differentiable function spaces. After a three year period as a professor of mathematics at the Kantonsschule Heerbrugg, he joined Niklaus Wirth's Lilith/ Modula research team in 1981. In 1985, after a sabbatical stay at the Xerox-PARC Research Laboratory in California, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the ETH. Then, together with Wirth, he developed the Oberon programming language and system.

Jürg Gutknecht's current focus of research is in the area of programming languages, compilers and runtime platforms, with an emphasis on object models and component technology. His newest constructive creations are the "Zonnon" language evolution and the "Bluebottle" runtime.