Rudolf Wille (2 November 1937 – 22 January 2017) was a German
mathematician and was professor of General Algebra from 1970 to 2003 at
Technische Universität Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt). His most celebrated work is the invention of
formal concept analysis, an unsupervised
machine learning technique that applies mathematical lattice theory to organize data based on objects and their shared attributes.
An accomplished musician and has also made contributions to Mathematics in Music, Mathematical Pedagogy and the Philosophy of Science, Wille played an active leadership role in the
concept lattice research community.
Wille was a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Philosophy at TU Darmstadt from 1976. From 1983, was leader of the research group on
Formal concept analysis and from 1993 Chairman of the "Ernst Schröder Center for Conceptual Knowledge Engineering". Wille was also a founding member of the Center for Inter-Disciplinary Research in Darmstadt and maintained a footprint in other research groups around the world as a visiting consulting/scholar.
Wille's research interests included algebra, order and
lattice theory, foundations of geometry,
discrete mathematics
Discrete mathematics is the study of mathematical structures that can be considered "discrete" (in a way analogous to discrete variables, having a bijection with the set of natural numbers) rather than "continuous" (analogously to continuous f ...
,
measurement theory, mathematics in music, philosophy of science, conceptual knowledge engineering and contextual logic.
A significant international community of researchers follow Wille's work on
Formal concept analysis, the main forums being the International Conferences on Formal Concept Analysis (
ICFCA), Conceptual Structures (see also
Conceptual graphs
A conceptual graph (CG) is a formalism for knowledge representation. In the first published paper on CGs, John F. Sowa used them to represent the conceptual schemas used in database systems. The first book on CGs applied them to a wide range of t ...
) (ICCS) and Concept Lattices and their Application (CLA) conferences. The first two are published in the
Lecture Notes in Computer Science and the latter is a multi-stage conference that produces journal papers.
A leader, inter-disciplinarian, peace activist and prolific mentor, Wille oversaw more than 100 German "Diplom- und Staatsexamenarbeiten" in Mathematics, 51 PhD dissertations, and 8 Postdoctoral "habilitation" qualifications.
Work
Wille authored more than 250 scientific publications and co-authored the highly cited and influential textbook on
Formal concept analysis with his longtime collaborator (and former PhD student) Bernhard Ganter who is now Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at TU Dresden:
* B. Ganter, R. Wille (1999) ''Formal Concept Analysis: Mathematical Foundations'', Springer-Verlag, .
References
External links
Ernst Schröder ZentrumRudolf Wille's pageat
The Mathematics Genealogy Project
The Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) is a web-based database for the academic genealogy of mathematicians.. By 31 December 2021, it contained information on 274,575 mathematical scientists who contributed to research-level mathematics. For a ty ...
ICCSICFCACLA
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wille, Rudolf
1937 births
2017 deaths
20th-century German mathematicians
Lattice theorists
Academic staff of Technische Universität Darmstadt
21st-century German mathematicians