Bjarne Stroustrup was born in Aarhus, Denmark in 1950. His biography on his own site records that he earned a Cand.Scient. in mathematics and computer science from the University of Aarhus in 1975, followed by a Ph.D. in computer science from Cambridge University in England in 1979, where his thesis advisor was David Wheeler.
In 1979 Stroustrup moved to New Jersey to join the Computer Science Research Center at Bell Telephone Laboratories. There he began the work that became C++. In his own answers to frequently asked questions, he writes that he started work on what became C++ in 1979, calling the early version “C with Classes,” and that “the name ‘C++’ was used late” in 1983.
Stroustrup designed C++ to make abstraction techniques affordable and manageable for mainstream projects. His biography notes that this approach helped C++ become one of the most widely used programming languages. He led the Large-Scale Programming Research Department at AT&T Bell Labs until late 2002.
He has received numerous honors, including the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, and is currently a professor of computer science at Columbia University. His firsthand histories of the language remain among the clearest primary records of how a major programming language was designed and evolved.