Debora Weber-Wulff Happenings

The Picture Book

We decided to track down *all* of his students - Diplom, Doctorate and Habilitation - and ask them to send us a picture and a business card. This project took months and many emails, since I was in Berlin and Claudia in Kiel. The Kiel phone book was instrumental in getting the first few people found, but it was hard getting the names to start with. The Diplom students could be found by going through the registers, but the doctoral students were more difficult, as HL had taught at a number of universities.

His wife gave us some hints about the names of people, but she didn't know where they were. One we even traced to Nürnberg, and we wrote to the Einwohnermeldeamt there, asking where he was. We got an answer - moved, no forwarding address. We were dejected, this was the only doctoral student we couldn't find. And then, Chance stepped in! On one of my Internet searches I found him as the Rector of the new FH in Paderborn! I wrote a letter, and it was him, and he was happy to send a picture.

In all we reached 125 of 150 diplom students and all of the doctoral and habilitation students. We bought the nicest photo book we could find and glued in all the pictures and cards, and compiled a nice bibliography including all the titles of the theses. Then we plotted the cities in which the people now lived on a map of Germany - not much white space!

Langmaack was very surprised and very happy to have this document of the influence that he has had on computer science in Germany. He especially enjoyed reading that one of the loudest students from a communistic group was now the boss of a large capitalist company :-)