Reinhard Wilhelm
Reinhard Wilhelm (born June 5, 1946) is a German computer scientist known for his work in programming languages, compiler construction and static program analysis. He was born in Deutmecke, now part of Finnentrop in Westphalia, Germany.
He studied math, physics and mathematical logic at the University of Münster, and computer science at the Technical University of Munich and Stanford University. He earned his PhD at TU Munich in 1977.
In 1978 he became a professor at Saarland University, where he led the chair for programming languages and compiler construction until his retirement in 2014. He also served as the scientific director of the Leibniz Center for Informatics at Schloss Dagstuhl from 1990 to 2014. He is now a professor emeritus at Saarland University.
Wilhelm helped found two major European programming conferences, ESOP and ETAPS, and his idea contributed to the creation of the European Association for Programming Languages and Systems (EAPLS). In 1998 he founded AbsInt, a company that makes software quality assurance tools based on abstract interpretation; these tools are used for certifying real-time requirements in embedded systems, such as those in the Airbus A380.
His research covers programming languages, compiler construction, static analysis and embedded real-time systems, as well as animation and visualization of algorithms. He helped connect code generation with tree automata, contributed to the MUG1/MUG2/OPTRAN compiler generators, and, with Ulrich Möncke, proposed grammar flow analysis. He and colleagues developed a popular three-valued shape analysis.
Wilhelm co-authored the book Compiler Construction. He was made a fellow of the ACM in 2000 for his work in compiler construction and program analysis and his leadership at the LZI. He has received many honors, including the Konrad Zuse Medal (2009), the Cross of the Order of Merit (2010) and the ACM Distinguished Service Award (2011). He became a member of Academia Europaea in 2008 and received honorary doctorates from RWTH Aachen and Tartu University in 2008. He was elected to the German National Academy Leopoldina in 2013. He has received additional recognitions for his long-term impact in real-time systems, including ESWEEK’s Test-of-Time award (2019), the IEEE Real-Time Systems Outstanding Technical Achievement and Leadership Award (2020), and the TCRTS Test-of-Time award (2021). In 2025 he received the ACM SIGBED Technical Achievement Award for his foundational work on WCET analysis, timing predictability and static analysis in embedded and cyber-physical systems.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 16:41 (CET).