Martin Odersky (born September 5, 1958) is a German computer scientist and a professor of programming methods at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. He focuses on analyzing code and creating programming languages. He led the development of Scala and Generic Java (and Pizza before that).
In 1989, he earned his Ph.D. from ETH Zurich under the guidance of Niklaus Wirth, who is famous for creating several programming languages, including Pascal. He later worked as a postdoctoral researcher at IBM and Yale University.
In 1997, he created the GJ compiler, and his work became the foundation for javac, the Java compiler.
In 2001, he and others started working on Scala, which had its first public release in 2004.
In 2007, he was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
On May 12, 2011, Odersky and his collaborators started Typesafe Inc. (later renamed Lightbend Inc. in February 2016), a company that provides commercial support, training, and services for Scala.
He teaches three courses on the Coursera online learning platform: Functional Programming Principles in Scala, Functional Program Design in Scala, and Programming Reactive Systems.
He was awarded the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award in 2025.