Lutz Michael Wegner


Lutz Michael Wegner is a German computer scientist.

Biography

Wegner was born in Weinsberg near Heilbronn, Germany, in 1949. He graduated from
Williston Academy in Easthampton, Mass. in 1968 and from :de:Theodor-Heuss-Gymnasium|Theodor-Heuss-Gymnasium
in Heilbronn in 1969. From 1969 to 1974 he studied industrial engineering at the University of Karlsruhe
finishing with an MBA to be followed by two years as a visiting Ph.D. student at the Department of
Computer Science of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. His thesis titled
„Analysis of two-level grammars“ was submitted and defended in Karlsruhe in 1977 with Hermann Maurer and
:de:Thomas Ottmann|Thomas Ottmann being the referees. In 1982 he received the venia legendi in applied computer science
from the University of Karlsruhe with an inaugural dissertation
on Quicksort variants for multisets. Examiners were Thomas Ottmann, Wolfgang Janko and
Jan van Leeuwen.
In 1984 he was appointed professor at the Hochschule Fulda and
went from there in 1987 to the University of Kassel where he served as full professor and chairman of
the database group since 1989 until his retirement in March 2015.
Lutz Wegner is divorced and has three children.

Achievements

Lutz Wegner started his career with fundamental research on two-level grammars, also known as
van Wijngaarden grammars which had been used to define the programming language Algol68.
His results were included in the Handbook of Formal Languages by Arto Salomaa and Grzegorz Rozenberg.
For his second thesis he developed variants of Quicksort suitable for multiset and proved that they
achieved the lower bound for quicksort algorithms previously given by Robert Sedgewick.
Following a sabbatical stay at the IBM Scientific Center Heidelberg he took an interest in the Non-First Normal-Form data model, also known as nested relational model, and designed a graphical editor which also served as base for
research on synchronous groupware. In 1986 he authored an E-learning course "Introduction to Unix", which
originally was a contribution to Hermann Maurer's COSTOC-Project, and with
several portings was in active use until 2015, thus constituting one of the longest running examples
of courseware.
Besides his scientific achievements Wegner was instrumental in introducing computer science studies
at the University of Kassel which started in 2001 after securing three additional,
sponsored professorships with :de:Traudl Herrhausen|Traudl Herrhausen, then a member of the Hessian Parliament, opening doors to
industry and charities.

Notable publications