Thomas Martinetz (born 2 January 1962 in

Nettesheim Rommerskirchen is the southernmost municipality in the Rhein-Kreis Neuss, in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Notable places Rommerskirchen possesses rich historical inheritances, including numerous remains of the Roman Villae Rusticae, and those ...

) is a German physicist and neuro-informatician.

Life

Thomas Martinetz studied mathematics and physics at the

Technical University of Munich The Technical University of Munich (TUM or TU Munich; german: Technische Universität München) is a public research university in Munich, Germany. It specializes in engineering, technology, medicine, and applied and natural sciences. Establis ...

, where he earned his doctorate in theoretical biophysics under

Klaus Schulten Klaus Schulten (January 12, 1947 – October 31, 2016) was a German-American computational biophysicist and the Swanlund Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Schulten used supercomputing techniques to appl ...

in 1992 after several years as a guest at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Uni ...

. After working in the central research and development department of Siemens AG, in 1996 he moved to a professorship at the Institute for Neuroinformatics of the

Ruhr University Bochum The Ruhr University Bochum (, ) is a public research university located in the southern hills of the central Ruhr area, Bochum, Germany. It was founded in 1962 as the first new public university in Germany after World War II. Instruction began in ...

and took over the management of the Center for Neuroinformatics GmbH. In 1999 he accepted a call to the

University of Lübeck The University of Lübeck is a research university in Lübeck, Northern Germany which focuses almost entirely on medicine and sciences with applications in medicine. In 2006, 2009 and 2016, the University of Lübeck was ranked No. 1 in medicine am ...

as director of the Institute for Neuro- and Bioinformatics. From 2006 to 2008 he was Vice-Rector of the University of Lübeck, and from 2008 to 2011 Vice-President for Research and Technology Transfer. Since 2013 he is chairman of the Senate of the University of Lübeck. His major contribution in the field of neuroinformatics is the so-called

Neural gas Neural gas is an artificial neural network, inspired by the self-organizing map and introduced in 1991 by Thomas Martinetz and Klaus Schulten. The neural gas is a simple algorithm for finding optimal data representations based on feature vec ...

, a variant of self-organizing maps. He is co-founder of the software companies Consideo, the Pattern Recognition Company and

gestigon Gestigon (stylized as gestigon) is a software development company founded in September 2011 by Sascha Klement, Erhardt Barth, and Thomas Martinetz. The company develops software for gesture control and body tracking based on 3D depth data. , ...

Awards

The Center for Neuroinformatics GmbH, whose management he took over in 1996, was awarded in the same year with the Innovation Award of the German economy. awarded him as a "courageous entrepreneur", and in 2011 he received the transfer award of the Innovation Foundation Schleswig-Holstein.

Publications

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Martinetz, Thomas 1962 births 20th-century German physicists University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty Living people 21st-century German physicists