Personal

Background

I grew up in Germany in Opladen, close to the City of Köln (Cologne). This definitively influenced my views and gave me the opportunity to travel across the world and obtain a good education.

The crest of the
City of Opladen

During my high-school years, I attended a variety of schools, including a catholic border school (Aloisiuskolleg, Bonn - Bad Godesberg) and the school that pioneered the modern high-school system in Germany (Landrat-Lucas-Schule, Opladen).

After the mandatory military service in Lüneburg, I moved to München (Munich) to start my higher education in physics. During this time, I had the opportunity to work as a Student Operator in the Leibniz-Rechen-zentrum of the universities in Munich. This allowed my to get some experience with CDC's NOS/VE, Cray's UNICOS and even a Kendall Square Research MP system.

When I moved back to Cologne, I started to work as systems and network administrator for the meteorology department and later for the theoretical physics department.

After finishing my Master of Science with a fairly mathematical thesis on transformations in super-algebras, I married my wonderful wife and started working for Sun Microsystems in Frankfurt am Main.

Science

As far as I can remember back, I always loved science. Amongst the usual boyhood dreams of becoming an astronaut, I always felt a strong desire to learn more about physics and mathematics.

Naturwisssenschaft ist entweder Physik oder Briefmarken sammeln.

Science is either physics or collecting stamps.

Wolfang Pauli (1900-1958)

During my school years I participated in the Bundeswettbewerb Mathematik (Federal Mathematics Contest), but never had the will nor desire to finish it.

In Munich, I was quite fascinated by Detlef Duerr's mathematics lessons, in particular those about the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics. He (and a few others) have been developing a very nice model for solving the obvious problems of the Copenhagen interpretation by treating the wave function as a pilot wave for the actual particle. This interpretation was first proposed by de Broglie and later significantly extended by David Bohm and John S. Bell.

In pure mathematics, I always loved algebra, topology, and - after a while - differential geometry. My favorite book is by Stan Wagon, "The Banach-Tarski Paradox".

As for popular science books, I always loved Roger Penrose's "The emperor's new mind" and Douglas Hofstadter's "Goedel, Escher, Bach". While it is not strictly a popular science book, this one is still among my favorites: Edwin Abbot Abbot's "Flatland - A romance of many dimensions."

Other Interests

Above everything else, I cherish my family. Besides that, I and getting more and more fascinated with international politics, history and foreign relations. I like music - pretty much everything from the Gregorian chants, Baroque, Classic, Romantic, to modern classics, but also some Jazz, Hard Rock, some Pop and Hard Trance.