Mr. Edward Nash Yourdon

An American software engineer, computer consultant, author and lecturer, and pioneer in the software engineering methodology, he is known as one of the lead developers of the structured analysis techniques of the 1970s, as co-developer of the Yourdon/Whitehead method for object-oriented analysis/design in the late 1980s and the Coad/Yourdon methodology for object-oriented analysis/design in the 1990s. He obtained his B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1965, and has done graduate work in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and the Polytechnic Institute of New York. In 1964 he started working at Digital Equipment Corporation developing FORTRAN programs for the PDP-5 minicomputer and later assembler for the PDP-8. Later in the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, after working at a small consulting firm and as independent consultant in 1974, he founded his own consulting firm, YOURDON Inc. to provide educational, publishing, and consulting services. After he sold this firm in 1986 he served on the Board of multiple IT consultancy corporations, and was advisor on several research projects in the software industry throughout the 1990s. In June 1997, he was inducted into the Computer Hall of Fame, along with such notables as Charles Babbage, Seymour Cray, James Martin, Grace Hopper, Gerald Weinberg, and Bill Gates; and in December, 1999 the Crosstalk: The Journal of Defense Software Engineering, named him one of the ten most influential people in the software field. In the late 1990s he became the center of controversy over his beliefs that Y2K-related computer problems would result in severe software failures that would culminate in widespread social collapse. These failures did not materialize and he was later criticized for exaggerating the severity of the problem. In the new millennium he became Faculty Fellow at the Information Systems Research Center of the University of North Texas, as well as Fellow of the Business Technology Trends Council for the Cutter Consortium were he also was editor of the Cutter IT Journal.