Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse was a German civil engineer, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-controlled Turing-complete Z3 became operational in May 1941. Thanks to this machine and its predecessors, Zuse has often been regarded as the inventor and father of the modern computer.
A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software.
Reverse Polish notation (RPN), also known as reverse Łukasiewicz notation, Polish postfix notation or simply postfix notation, is a mathematical notation in which operators follow their operands, in contrast to Polish notation (PN), in which operators precede their operands. It does not need any parentheses as long as each operator has a fixed number of operands. The description "Polish" refers to the nationality of logician Jan Łukasiewicz, who invented Polish notation in 1924.
Plankalkül is a programming language designed for engineering purposes by Konrad Zuse between 1942 and 1945. It was the first high-level programming language to be designed for a computer.
The Z3 was a German electromechanical computer designed by Konrad Zuse in 1938, and completed in 1941. It was the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer. The Z3 was built with 2,600 relays, implementing a 22-bit word length that operated at a clock frequency of about 5–10 Hz. Program code was stored on punched film. Initial values were entered manually.
Digital physics is a speculative idea that the universe can be conceived of as a vast, digital computation device, or as the output of a deterministic or probabilistic computer program. The hypothesis that the universe is a digital computer was proposed by Konrad Zuse in his 1969 book Rechnender Raum. The term digital physics was coined by Edward Fredkin in 1978, who later came to prefer the term digital philosophy. Fredkin encouraged the creation of a digital physics group at what was then MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, with Tommaso Toffoli and Norman Margolus as primary figures.
Volker Strassen is a German mathematician, a professor emeritus in the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Konstanz.
Calculating Space is Konrad Zuse's 1969 book on automata theory. He proposed that all processes in the universe are computational. This view is known today as the simulation hypothesis, digital philosophy, digital physics or pancomputationalism. Zuse proposed that the universe is being computed by some sort of cellular automaton or other discrete computing machinery, challenging the long-held view that some physical laws are continuous by nature. He focused on cellular automata as a possible substrate of the computation, and pointed out that the classical notions of entropy and its growth do not make sense in deterministically computed universes. Zuse's thesis was later expanded by German computer scientist Jürgen Schmidhuber in his technical report Algorithmic Theories of Everything.
The Z4 was arguably the world's first commercial digital computer. It was designed, and manufactured by early computer scientist Konrad Zuse's company Zuse Apparatebau, for an order placed by Henschel & Son, in 1942; though only partially assembled in Berlin, then completed in Göttingen, and not delivered by the defeat of Nazi Germany, in 1945. The Z4 was Zuse's final target for the Z3 design. Like the earlier Z2, it comprised a combination of mechanical memory and electromechanical logic, so was not a true electronic computer.
The Z1 was a motor-driven mechanical computer designed by Konrad Zuse from 1936 to 1937, which he built in his parents' home from 1936 to 1938. It was a binary electrically driven mechanical calculator with limited programmability, reading instructions from punched celluloid film.
The Z2 was an electromechanical digital computer that was completed by Konrad Zuse in 1940. It was an improvement on the Z1 Zuse built in his parents' home, which used the same mechanical memory. In the Z2, he replaced the arithmetic and control logic with 600 electrical relay circuits, weighing over 600 pounds.
Günter Hotz is a German pioneer of computer science. His work includes formal languages, digital circuits and computational complexity theory. In 1987, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research. In 1999 he was awarded the Konrad Zuse Medal of the Gesellschaft für Informatik.
Horst Zuse is a German computer scientist.
Haunetal is a municipality in Hersfeld-Rotenburg district in eastern Hesse, Germany. Haunetal is the district's southernmost municipality.
Raúl Rojas González is an emeritus professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at the Free University of Berlin, and a renowned specialist in artificial neural networks. The FU-Fighters, football-playing robots he helped build, were world champions in 2004 and 2005. He is now leading an autonomous car project called Spirit of Berlin.
The Zuse Institute Berlin is a research institute for applied mathematics and computer science on the campus of Freie Universität Berlin in Dahlem, Berlin, Germany.
The Konrad Zuse Medal for Services to Computer Science is the highest award of the Gesellschaft für Informatik, given every two years to one or sometimes two leading German computer scientists. It is named after German computer pioneer Konrad Zuse. Note that a different medal with the same name is also given out by the Zentralverband des Deutschen Baugewerbes.
Yasser Elshantaf is a Palestinian- German entrepreneur and political activist.
Markus Gross is a Professor of Computer science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH), head of its Computer Graphics Laboratory, and the director of Disney Research, Zurich. His research interests include physically based modeling, computer animation, immersive displays, and video technology. He has published more than 430 scientific papers on algorithms and methods in the field of computer graphics and computer vision, and holds more than 30 patents. He has graduated more than 60 Ph.D. students.
Matthias Heider is a German lawyer and politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who served as a member of the German Bundestag from 2009 until 2021.
