Design pattern

A design pattern is the re-usable form of a solution to a design problem. The idea was introduced by the architect Christopher Alexander and has been adapted for various other disciplines, most notably computer science.

Christopher Alexander is a widely influential architect and design theorist. His theories about the nature of human-centered design have affected fields beyond architecture, including software.

In software, Alexander is regarded as the father of the pattern language movement. The first wiki—the technology behind Wikipedia—led directly from Alexander's work, according to its creator, Ward Cunningham. Alexander's work has also influenced the development of agile software development.

Alexander is perhaps best known for his 1977 book A Pattern Language. It described a practical architectural system in a form that a theoretical mathematician or computer scientist might call a generative grammar. The greatest influence of A Pattern Language in computer science is the design patterns movement.

Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form was said to be required reading for researchers in computer science throughout the 1960s. It had an influence in the 1960s and 1970s on programming language design, modular programming, object-oriented programming, software engineering and other design methodologies.

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_pattern 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Timeless_Way_of_Building