Klaus Samelson

Klaus Samelson (December 21, 1918 – May 25, 1980) was a German mathematician, physicist, and computer pioneer in the area of programming language translation and push-pop stack algorithms for sequential formula translation on computers.

He was born in Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine, and he lived in Breslau in his early childhood years. His elder brother was the mathematician Hans Samelson. Due to political circumstances, he waited until 1946 to study Mathematics and Physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Munich.

After graduating, he worked briefly as a high school teacher before he returned to university. He completed his doctorate degree in Physics with Fritz Bopp with a dissertation on a quantum mechanical problem posed by Arnold Sommerfeld related to Unipolar Induction.

Dr Samelson became interested in Numerical Analysis, and when Hans Piloty, an electrical engineer, and Robert Sauer, a professor of Mathematics, began working together, he joined and got involved in early computers as a research associate in the Mathematical Institute of the Technical University Munich.

This changed his scientific career. His first publications came from Sauer's interests dealing with supersonic flow and precision problems of digital computations for numerical calculations of Eigenvalues.

Soon after, Samelson's strong influence began on the development of Computer Science and Informatics as a new scientific discipline. With Friedrich L. Bauer, who also had Fritz Bopp as his Ph.D. advisor, he studied the structure of programming languages in order to develop efficient algorithms for their translation and implementation. This research led to bracketed structures and it became clear to Samelson that this principle should govern the translation of programming languages and the run-time system with stack models and block structure. It was a fundamental breakthrough in how computer systems are modeled and designed.

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