Martin Odersky

Martin Odersky, born September 5, 1958, has established himself as a leading figure in programming language design and development. After receiving his Ph.D. from ETH Zurich in 1989 under Niklaus Wirth's supervision, he held research positions at IBM and Yale University, where he developed his passion for functional programming. His career achievements include co-designing Java generics and developing the javac reference compiler that became the standard Java compiler. In 1999, he joined EPFL as a full professor, where he leads the programming research group. His most significant contribution is creating the Scala programming language, which began development in 2001 and was first released in 2003. Scala successfully unifies object-oriented and functional programming paradigms while maintaining complete interoperability with Java and .NET. In 2011, he co-founded Typesafe (renamed to Lightbend in 2016) to provide commercial support for Scala. His work has earned him numerous accolades, including being named an ACM Fellow in 2007 for his contributions to programming language design. He currently teaches several courses on Coursera, including Functional Programming Principles in Scala, Functional Program Design in Scala, and Programming Reactive Systems, while continuing to oversee Scala's development as both an academic and industrial programming language.