Martin Odersky
German computer scientist who created the Scala programming language
- Age
- 68 yrs
- Birthday in 304 days
- Works listed
- 2
- Programming language, Book
- Honours
- 0
- Awards & distinctions
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Martin Odersky is a German computer scientist and professor at EPFL in Lausanne who created Scala, a language combining object-oriented and functional programming on the Java platform. He also co-designed Java generics and wrote the current Java compiler, javac.
Biography
Education
Odersky earned his doctorate at ETH Zurich in 1989 under Niklaus Wirth, and worked at IBM Research and Yale.
Java generics
With Philip Wadler he created Pizza and Generic Java, which became the basis of generics in Java 5. His GJ compiler became Sun’s standard javac.
Scala
At EPFL from 1999 he designed Scala, released in 2004. Scala was adopted by Twitter, LinkedIn and others, and Apache Spark and Kafka were written in it.
Scala 3
He co-founded the company Typesafe (later Lightbend) in 2011 and led the redesign that became Scala 3 in 2021. His online courses have taught functional programming to hundreds of thousands. He received the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award in 2025.
Timeline
-
1958
Born in Germany
-
1989
Doctorate from ETH Zurich
-
1998
Generic Java with Philip Wadler
-
1999
Joins EPFL
-
2004
Scala released
-
2011
Co-founds Typesafe
-
2012
Coursera course launches
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2021
Scala 3
Notable works
-
2004
Scala Programming language
-
2008
Programming in Scala Book
With Lex Spoon and Bill Venners.
Did you know?
-
1
Scala stands for “scalable language”.
-
2
He was a student of Niklaus Wirth.
-
3
Apache Spark is written mostly in Scala.
Connections
Frequently asked
Who is Martin Odersky?
Martin Odersky is a German computer scientist and professor at EPFL in Lausanne who created Scala, a language combining object-oriented and functional programming on the Java platform. He also co-designed Java generics and wrote the current Java compiler, javac.
How old is Martin Odersky?
Martin Odersky is 68 years old, born on 5 September 1958 in Germany.
Where is Martin Odersky from?
Martin Odersky was born in Germany.
What is Martin Odersky known for?
Martin Odersky is best known for Creating Scala (2004); Java generics and javac; EPFL professor.
References
- Martin Odersky — Wikipedia. Wikipedia. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
- Official website. lampwww.epfl.ch. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
- Martin Odersky (Q847990) — structured data. Wikidata. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
Includes material from the Wikipedia article “Martin Odersky”, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. That text is available under the same licence. Learn more
External links
About this profile
- Researched by the TrackFame editorial team; reviewed by Sanjay Sokal under our editorial policy
- First published 4 November 2026
- Last updated
Cite this page
“Martin Odersky.” TrackFame, last updated 4 November 2026. https://trackfame.com/person/martin-odersky
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