This quote appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, after the Hauptausschuß der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft had decided, on St.Nicolas' day, to give the Leibniz Prize 1997 to Ernst Mayr, the only computer scientist among 13 other scientists who were selected out of 180 proposals in a thorough, month-long screening process with international referees.

The Leibniz Prize is the most prestigious science prize in Germany awarded to outstanding candidates of whom it can be expected that they will carry on top quality research for another ten or fifteen years. Ernst Mayr received DM 1.5 million for his free disposal for research within the next five years. At the award ceremony on January 15, 1997 in the auditorium of Bonn University - with Chancellor Helmut Kohl attending - the president of the DFG, Prof.Dr.W.Frühwald mentioned in particular Mayr's recent success in the development of efficient parallel scheduling algorithms, which prevent the occurrence of waiting or idle times for processors, or of congestion in the transport of data and code.

Another important area in the work of E. Mayr - to which he contributed already in 1977 an essential and widely recognized result with his Master's Thesis at MIT in Cambridge, Mass. - deals with the algorithmic foundations of computer algebra; he and two of his Ph.D. students have for the first time given optimal algorithms for the central method of Gröbner basis computation and have determined the exact complexity of the problem.
E. Mayr became genuinely famous with the doctoral dissertation which he wrote with M.Paul his supervisor in 1978/79 within the SFB 49 at TU München; in this thesis, he solved the reachability problem for Petri nets, open for a long time, by giving an extremely complicated algorithm, the exact analysis and modification of which have occupied many scientists since then.

Before he went to MIT in 1976 for a year with a DAAD stipend, E.Mayr had finished his studies and obtained his diploma degree at the TUM, supported by the Stiftung Maximilianeum and the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes. In 1979, he returned to MIT (with a DFG research grant) and then as lecturer and later as professor, to Stanford University. In 1988, he returned to Germany, first to Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt, and since 1993, he has been at TU München.
The Fakultät für Informatik of the TUM is proud to have with E.Mayr, after M.Broy and G.Hirzinger a third recipient of the Leibniz Prize.

Wilfried.Brauer@informatik.tu-muenchen.de