Hermann Bottenbruch
Hermann Bottenbruch (b.September 14, 1928) is a German mathematician and computer scientist.
Bottenbruch grew up in Mülheim an der Ruhr in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Toward the end of the Second World War he served as a "Flakhelfer". In 1947 he began the study of mathematics at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn where he graduated in 1951. Following graduation he joined the staff of the Institute for Applied Mathematics at the Technische Universität Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt). The institute was founded by Alwin Walther. Bottenbruch earned his doctorate there in 1957.
In the same year on Walther's recommendation he joined the international working group to develop a new programming language. This language was intended to combine current understanding of programming languages into a single standard. According to Friedrich Bauer Bottenbruch coined the name "Algol", at least for Germany, from the English "Algorithmic Language“. In 1958 the members of the working group— Friedrich L. Bauer, Bottenbruch, Heinz Rutishauser, Klaus Samelson, John Backus, Charles Katz, Alan Perlis and Joseph Henry Wegstein— met at the ETH Zurich. The result of their deliberations was Algol 58.
In 1960 and 1961 Bottenbruch worked at the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After that he took a leading position in German industry where, among other things, he served as a specialist in the area of industrial chimney construction. In 1994 he founded his own company, Primasoft GmbH, in the German city of Oberhausen, providing IT consulting and database solutions.
Publications
- Construction of command languages and their translation into the program language of turing machines : applications of logic to advanced digital computer programming, 1957
- Proposal for a universal language for the description of computing processes. 1958. Zusammen mit Friedrich L. Bauer, Heinz Rutishauser und Klaus Samelson
- Structure and use of ALGOL 60, 1961
- Industrieschornsteine. Wirkung, Planung, Konstruktion. Tagungsleitung, Deutsche Bauindustrie. Bundesfachabteilung Feuerfest- und Schornsteinbau
- Begutachten, Sanieren und Umbauen freistehender Schornsteine in Massivbauart. Arbeitstagung, Essen 1986