Martin Odersky

Martin Odersky (born 5 September 1958) is a German computer scientist and professor of programming methods at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. He specializes in code analysis and programming languages. He designed the Scala programming language and Generic Java (and Pizza before) both with others. He implemented the GJ compiler, and his implementation became the basis of javac, the Java compiler. In 2007, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

In 1989, he received his Ph.D. from ETH Zurich under the supervision of Niklaus Wirth, who is best known as the designer of several programming languages, including Pascal. He did postdoctoral work at IBM and Yale University.

On 12 May 2011, Odersky and collaborators launched Typesafe Inc. (renamed Lightbend Inc., February 2016 (2016-02)), a company to provide commercial support, training, and services for Scala, and he currently serves as the chairman and chief architect.

He teaches two courses on the Coursera online learning platform: Functional Programming Principles in Scala and Functional Program Design in Scala.