peter naur born 25 october 1928 is a danish pioneer in computer science and turing award winner his last name is the n in the bnf notation backusnaur form used in the description of the syntax for most programming languages he contributed to the creation of the algol 60 programming languagehe began his career as an astronomer for which he received his phd degree in 1957 but his encounter with computers led to a change of profession from 1959 to 1969 he was employed at regnecentralen the danish computing institute while at the same time giving lectures at the niels bohr institute and the technical university of denmark from 1969 to 1998 naur was a professor of computer science at university of copenhagenhis main areas of inquiry are design structure and performance of computer programs and algorithms areas such as software engineering and software architecture have also been pioneered by naur in his book computing a human activity 1992 which is a collection of his contributions to computer science he rejects the formalist school of programming that view programming as a branch of mathematics he does not like being associated with the backusnaur form attributed to him by donald knuth and says that he would prefer it to be called the backus normal formnaur was married to computer scientist christiane floydnaur dislikes the very term computer science and suggests it be called datalogy this term has also been adopted in denmark and in sweden as datalogiin later years he has also been quite outspoken of the pursuit of science as a whole naur can possibly be identified with the empiricist school that tells that one shall not seek deeper connections between things that manifest themselves in the world but keep to the observable facts he has attacked both certain strands of philosophy and psychology from this viewpoint he is also currently developing a theory of human thinking which he calls synapsestate theory of mental lifenaur won the 2005 acm am turing award for his work on defining the algol 60 programming language in particular his role as editor of the influential report on the algorithmic language algol 60 with its pioneering use of bnf was recognized naur is the only dane to have won the turing award