High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Adriaan van Wijngaarden (2 November 1916 – 7 February 1987) was an important mathematician and computer scientist who is considered by many to have been the founding father of informatica (computer science) in the Netherlands. Even though he was trained as an engineer, van Wijngaarden would emphasize and promote the mathematical aspects of computing, first in numerical analysis, then in programming languages and finally in design principles of programming languages.