Maurice Paul Nivat (21 December 1937 – 21 September 2017) was a French computer scientist.

A 2006 citation for an honorary doctorate (Ph.D.) called Nivat one of the fathers of theoretical computer science.

[2] Nivat was admitted to the École normale supérieure in 1956, but began working at the Blaise Pascal Institute of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, a newly established computing laboratory, in 1959.

He was involved in many endeavours in theoretical computer science in Europe: he was one of the founders of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) in 1972 and organized the first International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP) conference in the same year at French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA, then called IRIA) in Paris.

[1] He was a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi,[4] which specified, supports, and maintains the programming languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.