Arie Nicolaas (Nico) Habermann Papers

Arie Nicolaas (Nico) Habermann (b. Groningen, Netherlands June 26, 1932; d. Pittsburgh, PA August 8, 1993) earned his B.S. in Mathematics and Physics and M.S. in Mathematics from the Free University of Amsterdam in 1953 and 1958, respectively. After a career as a secondary mathematics instructor, he achieved his doctorate in Applied Mathematics from the Technological University at Eindhoven (1967), where he was also engaged as a lecturer.

In 1968 Habermann was invited to the Department of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a visiting research scientist; in the next year, he was appointed associate professor. Promoted to full professor in 1974, he became acting Department Head in 1979 and served as official department head from 1980 to 1988. In the latter year he was named founding dean of the new CMU School of Computer Science (SCS), established under the co-direction of Allen Newell and Herbert Simon.

With Howard Wactlar, Habermann co-founded CMU's Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in 1985, having headed the faculty team that developed the winning proposal for that enterprise. With the support of university president Richard Cyert and faculty members such as Newell and Raj Reddy, Habermann was instrumental in attracting funding for SEI academic programs and graduate student research from foreign and American corporations (Siemens, ASCII, General Electric, et alia), and from US government agencies (Department of Defense, Office of Naval Research). Despite his administrative achievements, Habermann retained a personal commitment to computer science education, as reflected in the ordering of his customary signature: "A. N. Habermann, Professor and Dean". At CMU, he supervised more than twenty Ph.D. theses.

Habermann's research interests lay in programming languages, operating systems, programming environments, and the development of large software systems. He was known for his work on the avoidance of system deadlocks, process communication, process synchronization by path expression, program reusability, and software verification. He was renowned for his work in the programs ALGOL 60, BLISS, Pascal, in the Department of Defense language Ada, and for creating the Gandalf program development system, which provided a user-friendly environment for system construction and maintenance. In addition, he contributed to practical and experimental operating systems such as Dutch professor E. W. Dijkstra's THE System, the Family of Operating Systems (FAMOS) at CMU, the Dynamically Adaptable System (DAS) of Berlin, Germany, and UNIX. He authored two textbooks: Introduction to Operating Systems Design (Science Research Associates, 1976); and, with Dewayne E. Perry, ADA for Experienced Programmers (Addison-Wesley, 1983).

Habermann enjoyed worldwide demand as a lecturer, conference program committee member, evaluator of university Computer Science programs, science institution board member or advisor, consultant to corporate research and design departments (including Siemens and IBM), and even as an expert witness in computer systems-related legal arbitration. His prominence in and dedication to the computer science field led him to highly-regarded editorial work for the journals of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and the IEEE (Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers) journal, among other organizations. His paper reviews and oversight of reviews by valued colleagues established scientific standards of cogency and usefulness in the literature of the discipline.

Habermann served as a visiting professor at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England (1973), the Technological University of Berlin, Germany (1976), and as an adjunct professor of Computer Science at Jiao Tong University, Shanghai (1986-1993). During an academic leave from CMU, he served as the assistant dirctor for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the National Science Foundation (NSF), an organization he had previously served in several capacities. During this time, Habermann continued his administrative duties to SCS and SEI and was honored by CMU as the Alan J. Perlis Professor of Computer Science. His devoted engagement in the furthering of the university and of computer science was cut short by his sudden death, by a massive heart attack, at the age of 62. He was survived by his wife Marta (née Blom), son Frits, and daughters Eveline Killian and Irene and Marianne Habermann.