Adriaan "Aad" van Wijngaarden was a Dutch mathematician and computer scientist. Trained as a mechanical engineer, Van Wijngaarden emphasized and promoted the mathematical aspects of computing, first in numerical analysis, then in programming languages and finally in design principles of such languages.

ALGOL is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in textbooks and academic sources for more than thirty years.