"Computer Science is characterized by the breathtaking speed of its practical applications". According to the TUM-Mitteilungen of December 1994, this was the opening of the laudatio Professor Dr. Manfred Broy gave on the occasion of the award ceremony on November 18, 1994 when the prize named after Friedrich Ludwig Bauer was awarded to Professor Robin Milner, Edinburgh.

With the conferment of the prize, a first-rate achievement of a scientist in the field of computer science is to be honored; at the same time, the scientific contacts between the Fakultät für Informatik and the institutions where the prize winners do research and teaching should be established and deepened. The prize, which amounts to 50 000 Deutschmarks, is administered by the Bund der Freunde der TU München, which has for this purpose a board of control comprising Professor Dr.-Ing. Otto Meitinger, former president of the TU München (chair), Professor Dr. Horst Fuhrmann, former president of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Dr. Elmar Prasch, treasurer of the Bund der Freunde der TUM, Professor Dr. Christoph Zenger as managing director named by the Bund der Freunde der TUM, and the professor emeritus (since 1989) Professor Dr. Dr.h.c. mult. Friedrich L. Bauer.

The award ceremony with Prof. Manna, Prof. Meitinger and Prof. Bauer

November 27, 1992, the first award of the F. L. Bauer Prize was to Professor Zohar Manna, Stanford University, "honoring his scientific work in the field of semantics and logic of programming". On this day, computer science at the TUM celebrated with a "Festakt" its founding as an independent faculty and commemorated the 25th anniversary of the introduction of the Studiengang Informatik in Germany - which started in Munich in the winter term 1967/68 with "Einführung in die Informationsverarbeitung", held by Professor Bauer

Professor Manna did pioneering work in the fields automated proofs, logic of programs, parallel systems, and realtime systems, as well as verification of programs and program synthesis. He is the originator of such fundamental concepts as optimal fixpoint, call-by-need principle, and ordering of multisets. In cooperation with Amir Pnueli, Zohar Manna developed the theory of specification and verification of concurrent programs with the help of branching time logic, creating a basis for a proof methodology which is generally accepted today.

The second award of the prize was on the occasion of the Tag der Informatik in 1994, to Professor Robin Milner, University of Edinburgh, " honoring his scientific work in the field of programming languages and the semantics of programming". Professor Milner made essential contributions to the foundations of computer science, among which is listed the functional programming language ML, the development of which he guided in a project over twelve years. The stimulation he gave for the description of distributed interactive systems was sensational.
This problem area, of vital importance for questions of computer networks, parallel computation, and telecommunications, was influenced and promoted by Robin Milner's work on the representation of communicating processes and the description of mobile systems.

The third recipient of the F. L. Bauer Prize, on November 15, 1996, was Professor Anne Sjerp Troelstra of Amsterdam University, one of the leading scientists with a worldwide reputation in the field of proof theory and constructive mathematics, "honoring his internationally outstanding scientific work in the field of constructivism in logic and computer science". Professor Troelstra is a scientific grandson of the famous mathematician and logician Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer; his academic teacher was Arend Heyting. It was his particular aim to free intuitionistic logic from dogmatic aspects, thus establishing it as an independent and rich constructive tool of mathematical logic, taking into account that in today's computer science intuitionistic logic plays a prominent role for the extraction of programs from proofs.

Thomas.Ströhlein@informatik.tu-muenchen.de