Honorary doctorates

Konrad Zuse

Konrad Zuse was born in Berlin in 1910. He studied civil engineering and developed the vision of freely programmable machines that would relieve engineers of computing work. In 1938, he built the Z1, a mechanical calculating machine that featured key principles of the computer architecture that prevails today. In 1941, Konrad Zuse created the Z3, which is considered the world's first working computer. The Z3 thus marked the beginning of a new era in the history of technology. Until the 1960s, Konrad Zuse designed and built a large number of innovative and commercially used computers. In 1985, he became an honorary member of the German Informatics Society, which has awarded the Konrad Zuse Medal every two years since 1987.

Juris Hartmanis

Juris Hartmanis was born in 1928 in Riga, Latvia. He studied physics in Magdeburg and - after emigration - applied mathematics in Kansas City. He received his doctorate in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology. After working at the General Electric Research Laboratory, he accepted the Walter R. Read Professorship at Cornell University. For his pioneering research achievements in the field of complexity theory, he received - together with R. E. Stearns - the ACM Turing Award in 1993. Hartmanis is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. During his tenure as Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation for Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering and Chairman of the National Research Council, he contributed significantly to the expansion of computer science in the United States. Prof. Hartmanis received an honorary doctorate from the department in 1995.

Dorothea Wagner

Due to her extraordinary scientific achievements, Prof. Dr. Dorothea Wagner received an honorary doctorate from the Department of Computer Science on November 8, 2022. Since 2003, Dorothea Wagner has been a professor of computer science at the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KiT). From 1976 to 1986, she studied and received her doctorate at RWTH Aachen University. After her habilitation in 1992 at the TU Berlin, she held a chair in computer science at the University of Konstanz from 1994 to 2003. Dorothea Wagner has published more than 250 scientific papers on topics in algorithms and has coordinated several national and international research projects. Her research focuses on algorithms for complex networks, with an interest in developing theoretically sound yet practical algorithms for important application domains. In doing so, she follows the methodology of algorithm engineering, which combines careful realistic modeling with deep theoretical analysis and detailed, methodologically clean experimental evaluation. Her research focuses on graph algorithms, network analysis and visualization, algorithms for future mobility systems, and the energy system of the future. With her algorithms, Dorothea Wagner has contributed in particular to innovative route planning and journey planner systems, and her methods are now used productively in commercial route planning systems.