Wegstein was born on April 7, 1922 in
Washburn, Illinois. He attended the
University of Illinois, where he earned a
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in
physics in 1944, and graduated with a
Master of Science (M.S.) in
engineering physics in 1948. He worked as Acting Chief of the Office for Information Processing Standards, at the National Bureau of Standards, now
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where he specialized in
technical standards for automatic
data processing, especially in the technology of
fingerprint recognition. He participated in conferences in
Zürich in 1958 and Paris in 1960 which developed the
programming languages
ALGOL 58 and
ALGOL 60, respectively. He was involved with
international standards in programming and informatics, in at least two groups. He was a member of the
International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP)
IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi, which
specified, maintains, and supports the languages ALGOL 60 and 68. He was a member of the
Conference/Committee on Data Systems Languages (
CODASYL) committee, and involved in developing the
COBOL language. ==Publications==