Ingo Wegener (December 4, 1950 in

Bremen Bremen (Low German also: ''Breem'' or ''Bräm''), officially the City Municipality of Bremen (, ), is the capital of the States of Germany, German state of the Bremen (state), Free Hanseatic City of Bremen (), a two-city-state consisting of the c ...

– November 26, 2008 in

Bielefeld Bielefeld () is a city in the Ostwestfalen-Lippe Region in the north-east of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. With a population of 341,755, it is also the most populous city in the administrative region () of Detmold (region), Detmold and the L ...

) was an influential German computer scientist working in the field of

theoretical computer science Theoretical computer science is a subfield of computer science and mathematics that focuses on the Abstraction, abstract and mathematical foundations of computation. It is difficult to circumscribe the theoretical areas precisely. The Associati ...

Education and career

Wegener was educated at the

Bielefeld University Bielefeld University () is a public university in Bielefeld, Germany. Founded in 1969, it is one of the country's newer universities, and considers itself a "reform" university, following a different style of organization and teaching than the e ...

. He earned a diploma in mathematics there in 1976, a doctorate in 1978, and a

habilitation Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in Germany, France, Italy, Poland and some other European and non-English-speaking countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excelle ...

in 1981. His doctoral dissertation, ''Boolesche Funktionen, deren monotone Komplexität fast quadratisch ist'', was jointly supervised by and Rudolf Ahlswede. He was a computer science professor at

Goethe University Frankfurt Goethe University Frankfurt () is a public research university located in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It was founded in 1914 as a citizens' university, which means it was founded and funded by the wealthy and active liberal citizenry of Frankfurt ...

from 1980 until 1987, when he moved to the

Technical University of Dortmund TU Dortmund University () is a technical university in Dortmund, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany with over 35,000 students, and over 6,000 staff including 300 professors, offering around 80 Bachelor's and master's degree programs. It is situate ...

. He remained at Dortmund until his death.

Contributions

Wegener's dissertation research concerned

circuit complexity In theoretical computer science, circuit complexity is a branch of computational complexity theory in which Boolean functions are classified according to the size or depth of the Boolean circuits that compute them. A related notion is the circui ...

, and he was known for his research on

Boolean function In mathematics, a Boolean function is a function whose arguments and result assume values from a two-element set (usually , or ). Alternative names are switching function, used especially in older computer science literature, and truth functi ...

s and

binary decision diagram In computer science, a binary decision diagram (BDD) or branching program is a data structure that is used to represent a Boolean function. On a more abstract level, BDDs can be considered as a compressed representation of sets or relations. Un ...

s. He wrote two books on related topics, ''The Complexity of Boolean Functions'' (Wiley, 1987, also called "the blue book") and ''Branching Programs and Binary Decision Diagrams: Theory and Applications'' (SIAM Press, 2000). Beginning in the 1990s, his research interests shifted towards the theoretical analysis of

metaheuristic In computer science and mathematical optimization, a metaheuristic is a higher-level procedure or heuristic designed to find, generate, tune, or select a heuristic (partial search algorithm) that may provide a sufficiently good solution to an op ...

s and

evolutionary computation Evolutionary computation from computer science is a family of algorithms for global optimization inspired by biological evolution, and the subfield of artificial intelligence and soft computing studying these algorithms. In technical terms ...

Awards and honors

Wegener was elected as a fellow of the German society for computer science, the

Gesellschaft für Informatik The German Informatics Society (GI) () is a German professional society for computer science, with around 20,000 personal and 250 corporate members. It is the biggest organized representation of its kind in the German-speaking world. History The ...

, in 2004. For his merits on teaching and research in the field of theoretical computer science, he earned in 2006 the

Konrad Zuse Medal The Konrad Zuse Medal for Services to Computer Science is the highest award of the (German Computer Science Society), given every two years to one or sometimes two leading German computer scientists. It is named after German computer pioneer Konra ...

from the Gesellschaft für Informatik.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wegener, Ingo 1950 births German computer scientists 2008 deaths Bielefeld University alumni Academic staff of Goethe University Frankfurt Academic staff of the Technical University of Dortmund