Friedrich Ludwig Bauer is considered a pioneer of computer science. He invented the principle of the “cellar memory” data structure, for which he received the IEEE’s Computer Pioneer Award in 1988, coined the term software engineering and had a decisive influence on the Algol 60 programming language. The Stanislaus logical machine and the first error-detecting and error-correcting codes can be traced back to him. Bauer was committed to the recognition of computer science as a scientific discipline in Germany and gave the first official computer science lecture at the Technical University of Munich in 1967.
A native of Regensburg, he studied mathematics and theoretical physics. He conducted research in the fields of algebra, numerical analysis, programming languages and methods, software engineering, and mathematical logic. For his work – more than 350 papers – Bauer was awarded, among others, the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class in 1982. Since 1982, the TU Munich has awarded the Friedrich L. Bauer Prize for Computer Science.