Peter Wegner (1) (1932–2017)

Peter A. Wegner was born to an Austrian Jewish couple in Leningrad, USSR (St. Petersburg, Russia). His parents Hermine Wegner and Leo Weiden were Communists who had emigrated to Russia because they believed it would provide a better life for them. During the Great Terror of 1937, when Peter was five years old, his father, a senior librarian at the National Library of Science, was arrested by the NKVD. Peter never saw him again. He and his mother returned to Vienna in January 1938, two months prior to Nazi Germany's Anschluss (annexation) of Austria. Hermine Wegner escaped the Nazis with several friends by skiing cross-country into Switzerland. Peter stayed with his maternal grandmother, Jetta Wegner. From Switzerland, his mother was able to obtain a visa for England by taking a job as a live-in maid in a London suburb. In April 1939, six-year-old Peter went alone on a Kindertransport to the UK, where he was reunited with his mother. He was sent to Bunce Court, a progressive German-Jewish boarding school relocated to Kent in 1933 by its farsighted head teacher, Anna Essinger. He stayed at the school for nine years. In 1948, he received a scholarship to study at Imperial College, London University, where he earned a BA in mathematics in 1953. He received a post-graduate diploma (equivalent to a master's degree) in numerical analysis and automatic computing from Cambridge University a year later. At Cambridge, he met his future wife, Judith Romney, a Newnham College student; they married in 1956. He worked briefly at Manchester University before spending an academic year in Israel, where he was invited to work on the Weizmann Automatic Computer (WEIZAC), one of the world's first large-scale, stored-program, electronic computers, at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He returned to England in 1955 and was hired by the Prudential Insurance Company to develop actuarial software. In 1956, he left Prudential for CAV Aerospace, where he worked on airline programming. He soon left that position for Pennsylvania State University and then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1960, Wegner moved to the mathematical laboratory of Harvard University, helping faculty with their programming requirements. He returned to England in 1961 to become a lecturer at the London School of Economics for three years, before returning to the USA as assistant professor in the mathematics department at Penn State. In 1966, he became one of the first members of the new computer science department at Cornell University. In 1969, Brown University offered Wegner a position with tenure, and he spent the rest of his career there. Wegner wrote or edited more than a dozen books on programming languages and software engineering. In 1968, he was awarded a PhD by the University of London following the publication of his book Programming Languages, Information Structures, and Machine Organization.