Niklaus Wirth was born on February 15, 1934 in Switzerland.
He got his bachelor's and master's
in Europe and his Ph. D. at UC Berkeley (1963). From
Cal Dr. Wirth went on to teach computer science
first at Stanford, then at the Federal Institute of Technology
in Zurich, Switzerland (where he presently is.) As rp says above,
Dr. Wirth is best known for the Pascal,
a computer language he originally envisioned as teaching
tool rather than a full-fledge production-ready language.
He is also the creator of Oberon and Modula-2.
Dr. Wirth's homepage is at
http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~wirth