On August 27, 1926, Kristen Nygaard was born in Oslo, Norway — a mathematician and computer scientist who would go on to co-invent object-oriented programming, one of the most influential ideas in the history of software.
Working at the Norwegian Computing Center through the 1960s alongside colleague Ole-Johan Dahl, Nygaard helped build Simula I and later Simula 67, languages designed to simulate complex systems like factory operations and shipping logistics. To make that simulation work manageable, the pair introduced ideas that sound completely ordinary to any programmer today: bundling data and behavior together into “objects,” organizing those objects into “classes,” and letting classes inherit traits from one another. At the time, none of this existed anywhere else. Simula quietly laid the groundwork for C++, Java, Objective-C, and eventually the graphical, object-based interfaces behind both the Mac OS and Windows.
Nygaard spent the rest of his career at the University of Oslo, and in 2001 he and Dahl were jointly awarded the Turing Award — computing’s equivalent of a Nobel Prize — for the Simula work nearly forty years after they’d done it. He died in 2002, but essentially every modern programming language carries a piece of what he and Dahl worked out in that Oslo research center.
Source: Wikipedia — Kristen Nygaard
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