Origins & Early Life

Bjarne Stroustrup ( ; Danish: [ˈbjɑːnə ˈstʁʌwˀstʁɔp]; born 30 December 1950) is a Danish computer scientist, known for the development of the C++ programming language. He led the Large-scale Programming Research department at Bell Labs, served as a professor of computer science at Texas A&M University, and spent over a decade at Morgan Stanley while also being a visiting professor at Columbia University. Since 2022 he has been a full professor at Columbia. In 2026, he additionally joined the quantitative trading firm Susquehanna International Group as a part-time technical fellow.

Pivotal Works & Achievements

Stroustrup was born in Aarhus, Denmark. His family was working class, and he attended local schools. He attended Aarhus University from 1969 to 1975 and graduated with a Candidatus Scientiarum in mathematics with computer science. His interests focused on microprogramming and machine architecture. He learned the fundamentals of object-oriented programming from one of its inventors, Kristen Nygaard, who frequently visited Aarhus.

Enduring Legacy & Impact

In 1979, he received his PhD in computer science from the University of Cambridge, where his research on distributed computing was supervised by David...

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