Heinz Rutishauser

Heinz Rutishauser (30 January 1918 in Weinfelden, Switzerland – 10 November 1970 in Zürich) was a Swiss mathematician and a pioneer of modern numerical mathematics and computer science.

Heinz Rutishauser's father died when he was 13 years old and his mother died three years later, so together with his younger brother and sister he went to live in their uncle's home. From 1936, Rutishauser studied mathematics at the ETH Zürich where he graduated in 1942. From 1942 to 1945 he was assistant of Walter Saxer at the ETH and from 1945 to 1948 a mathematics teacher in Glarisegg and Trogen. In 1948 he received his PhD from ETH with a well-received thesis on complex analysis.

From 1948 to 1949 Rutishauser was in the United States at the Universities of Harvard and Princeton in order to study the state of the art in computing. From 1949 to 1955 he was a research associate at the Institute for Applied Mathematics at ETH Zürich recently founded by Eduard Stiefel, where he worked together with Ambros Speiser on the development of the first Swiss computer ERMETH, and developed the programming language Superplan (1949–1951), the name being a reference to "Rechenplan" (i.e. computation plan), in Konrad Zuse's terminology designating a single Plankalkül-program. He contributed in particular in the field of compiler pioneering work and was eventually involved in defining the programming languages ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60.

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