Famous Engineers from Denmark

Agner Krarup Erlang (January 1, 1878 – February 3, 1929) was a Danish mathematician, statistician, and engineer. Erlang invented traffic engineering and queueing theory. By his early death at age 51, Erlang created the field of telephone networks analysis. Erlang's early work studying local, exchange, and trunk telephone line usage in a small community to grasp the theoretical needs of an efficient network led to the Erlang formula. This formula became a base for modern telecommunication network studies.

Bjarne Stroustrup (born December 30, 1950; Danish: [ˈpjaːnə ˈstʁɒʊ̯ˀstʁɔp]) is a Danish computer scientist. He created and developed the C++ programming language. Stroustrup is a visiting professor at Columbia University. He works at Morgan Stanley as a Managing Director in New York.

Professor Dines Bjørner (born October 4, 1937, in Odense) is a Danish computer scientist. He researches domain engineering, requirements engineering, and formal methods. Bjørner worked with Cliff Jones and others on the Vienna Development Method (VDM) at IBM Laboratory Vienna and other places. Later, he worked on the RAISE (Rigorous Approach to Industrial Software Engineering) formal method with tool support. Bjørner taught at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) from 1965–1969 and 1976–2007. He retired in March 2007.

Flemming Rasmussen (born January 1, 1958 in Copenhagen) is a Danish engineer, producer, mixer, and owner and founder of Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen, Denmark. Rasmussen currently serves as main engineer/producer at Sweet Silence North in Helsingør.

Harald Trap Friis (February 22, 1893 – June 15, 1976), who published as H. T. Friis, was a Danish-American radio engineer. His work at Bell Laboratories included leading contributions to radio propagation, radio astronomy, and radar. His two Friis formulas remain widely used.

Lotte Meldgaard is an engineer and athlete. She represented Denmark in the 2012 Summer Olympics.

Ludwig August Colding (July 13, 1815 – March 21, 1888) was a Danish civil engineer and physicist. Colding stated the principle of energy conservation at the same time as, and apart from, James Prescott Joule and Julius Robert von Mayer. However, his contribution was largely ignored.

Paul Bert Elvstrøm (February 25, 1928 – December 7, 2016) was a Danish yachtsman. Elvstrøm won four Olympic gold medals and eleven world titles across eight boat types, including Snipe, Soling, Star, Flying Dutchman, and Finn.

Peder Oluf Pedersen (June 19, 1874 – August 30, 1941) was a Danish engineer and physicist. He worked on electrotechnology. Pedersen cooperated with Valdemar Poulsen on developing wire recorders, which he named a telegraphone, and the Poulsen Arc Transmitter. Pedersen became a professor of telegraphy, telephony, and radio in 1912. He became principal of the College of Advanced Technology (Den Polytekniske Læreanstalt) in 1922; he kept this title until his death. He held membership in the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.

Per Brinch Hansen (November 13, 1938 – July 31, 2007) was a Danish-American computer scientist. He worked on operating systems, concurrent programming, and parallel and distributed computing.

Povl Ahm CBE FICE FREng (September 26, 1926 – May 15, 2005) was a structural engineer. Ahm served as the former chairman of Ove Arup & Partners.

Valdemar Poulsen (November 23, 1869 – July 23, 1942) was a Danish engineer. He made major contributions to early radio technology. Poulsen developed a magnetic wire recorder called the telegraphone in 1898. He created the first continuous wave radio transmitter, the Poulsen arc transmitter, in 1903. Some early broadcasting stations used the Poulsen arc transmitter until the early 1920s.