Bjarne Stroustrup

Bjarne Stroustrup was born on December 30, 1950.⁠[1]

By his own account, he was born in Aarhus, Denmark, did not come from an academic family but did well in school; as a boy he delivered newspapers and milk for pocket money, played soccer and joined the Boy Scouts to explore the woods outside town.⁠[2]

In 1975, he earned a master’s degree in mathematics from Aarhus University.⁠[3]

In 1979, he received a PhD in computer science from the University of Cambridge with the thesis “Communication and Control in Distributed Computer Systems.”⁠[4]

From March 1979 he was a member of technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, becoming a distinguished member of technical staff in June 1987; from July 1995 to October 2002 he was a department head at AT&T Laboratories – Research in Florham Park, New Jersey.⁠[5]

He and his wife, Marian, had their daughter in Cambridge; in 1979 the family moved to New Jersey, where their son was later born in Meyersville.⁠[6]

Work on C with Classes began in April 1979; the first C++ was in use at Bell Labs in 1983, and the language was named C++ in 1984.⁠[7]

He explained his original motivation: “I wanted to write efficient systems programs in the styles encouraged by Simula67.”⁠[8]

In February 1985, the educational Cfront Release E became the first external release of C++; Cfront 1.0, in October of that year, was the first commercial release.⁠[7]

That year he published The C++ Programming Language; in 1990 he co-wrote The Annotated C++ Reference Manual with M. A. Ellis, and in 1994 he published The Design and Evolution of C++.⁠[4]

In 1989, he took an active role in creating the ANSI/ISO standard for C++.⁠[6]

In 1993, the ACMAustralian Community MediaAustralian Community Media (ACM) is an Australian regional and rural news publishing group with more than 100 brands, including The Canberra Times; in 2019 Nine sold it to a company controlled by interests associated with Antony Catalano and Thorney Investment Group.Open the full entry gave him the Grace Murray Hopper Award for “his early work laying the foundations for the C++ programming language”; in 1994 he was named an ACM Fellow.⁠[9]

In 1995, BYTE magazine named him one of the 20 most influential people in the computer industry over the preceding 20 years.⁠[10]

On July 26, 2002, Texas A&M University announced that he had accepted the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science and would move his research there; department head Jennifer Welch said he would bring “great visibility” to the department and the university.⁠[10]

He joined the Texas A&M computer science faculty in fall 2002 and was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2004, in a class of 76 new US members.⁠[11]

The same year, the IEEE Computer Society gave him the Computer Entrepreneur Award for pioneering the development and commercialization of industrial-strength object-oriented programming technologies.⁠[12]

In 2005, he received Sigma Xi’s William Procter Prize; in 2010 he received Aarhus University’s Rigmor og Carl Holst-Knudsens Videnskapspris.⁠[3]

In 2008, he received the Dr. Dobb’s Excellence in Programming Award. In the article he said: “I always like to build things and see things work.”⁠[13]

As of October 2013, he was a University Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University and had been involved in the ISO C++ standards effort for more than 20 years.⁠[14]

Morgan Stanley hired him in 2014; by January 2015 he was a managing director in Morgan Stanley’s technology division, a visiting professor of computer science at Columbia University and a distinguished research professor at Texas A&M.⁠[15][16]

He explained the move into finance: “I moved to Morgan Stanley to get back to solving real problems.”⁠[17]

In 2015, AITO gave him the senior Dahl-Nygaard Prize for the design, implementation and evolution of C++. He said: “I feel particularly honored by this award because I knew Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard.”⁠[18]

On February 5, 2015, the Computer History Museum recorded his oral history, with Paul McJones as interviewer.⁠[1]

He was one of three 2015 Computer History Museum Fellows and was inducted into the museum’s Hall of Fellows on April 25.⁠[19]

In September 2017, he was awarded the Faraday Medal, the highest individual honor of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), with the ceremony set for November 15 in London. He said: “This privilege is only possible through the superb work of the C++ community.”⁠[20]

The same year, he became an honorary fellow of Churchill College, University of Cambridge.⁠[21]

On January 3, 2018, the US National Academy of Engineering announced that he would receive the 2018 Charles Stark Draper Prize, worth $500,000, “for conceptualizing and developing the C++ programming language.”⁠[22]

He called it “a rare and great honor” and said the award motivated him to work harder on improving software; the prize was presented at a gala dinner in Washington, D.C., on February 20, 2018.⁠[23]

Draper President Kaigham J. Gabriel said: “C++ stands as one of the most influential programming languages in the history of computing.”⁠[24]

The same year, the IEEE Computer Society gave him the Computer Pioneer Award for bringing object-oriented and generic programming into the mainstream through his design and implementation of C++.⁠[12]

On January 25, 2019, University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain invested him as Doctor Honoris Causa.⁠[25]

He said that as a Technical Fellow at Morgan Stanley he mostly dealt with distributed systems, programming techniques and teaching, that his ISO C++ standard and C++ Core Guidelines work counted as part of the job, and that he taught a software design course at Columbia University every year.⁠[15]

On November 7, 2019, he appeared on Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry’s podcast (then called the Artificial Intelligence Podcast) in an episode about C++, covering his first program, the path to C++, efficiency and reliability, the zero-overhead principle, Concepts, the C++ standards process, and constructors and destructors.⁠[26]

In June 2020, he published the 168-page paper Thriving in a Crowded and Changing World: C++ 2006–2020, reviewing the language’s features, standardization and future. He wrote: “The C++ taught today is still mostly outdated and backwards looking.”⁠[27]

On May 5, 2021, he gave the first UTU Tech Webinar of the University of Turku’s Faculty of Technology in Finland, speaking over Zoom on C++ from 2006 to 2020 and taking questions.⁠[28]

On April 2, 2022, he retired from Morgan Stanley; from July that year he was a professor at Columbia University. He and his wife live in New York City; their daughter is a medical doctor and their son a research professor in systems biology.⁠[6]

Responding in December 2022 to the US National Security Agency’s memory-safety guidance, he wrote that “the billions of lines of C++ code will not magically disappear” and argued for applying safety guarantees only where required.⁠[29]

On February 26, 2024, the White House released a report urging developers to use languages without memory-safety flaws, naming C and C++ as examples. He responded: “Improving safety has been an aim of C++ from day one and throughout its evolution.”⁠[30]

In April 2024, Addison-Wesley published the third edition of his textbook Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++, aimed at people who have never programmed before and using C++20 and C++23.⁠[31]

In 2025, he published “21st Century C++,” an article of about 6,300 words in Communications of the ACM, advocating guideline-enforcing “profiles” to detect and mitigate coding errors and changing the culture and tools around the language rather than the language itself.⁠[32]

On July 14, 2026, as a Columbia University professor, he gave the STEAM Academy seminar “21st Century C++” in CERN’s Main Auditorium, presenting standard C++ built around strongly typed generic programming, modules, no resource leaks and systematic error handling.⁠[33]

The lecture filled the auditorium, the Council Chamber was opened for overflow, and about 900 people attended in person and online.⁠[34]

In August 2026, Susquehanna announced that he had joined the firm as a Technical Fellow, working with its engineering teams on its C++ infrastructure, and would attend CppCon 2026 in Aurora, Colorado, on September 12–18 with the company. He said: “Financial software places extraordinary demands on performance, reliability, and maintainability.”⁠[35]

His work covers the C++ used across the firm’s trading, research and risk-management systems; financial terms of the appointment were not disclosed.⁠[36]

As of October 2026, his personal homepage lists him as a professor of computer science at Columbia University.⁠[37]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.stroustrup.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[37]