In Memoriam Christian Freksa
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BITUARY
In Memoriam Christian Freksa Helen Piel1 · Rudolf Seising1
© Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
On 12 November 2020 one of the most important and yet most unpretentious scientists in AI and cognitive science has passed away: Christian Freksa (Fig. 1). One of us (R.S.) had known Christian for one decade because of our shared interests in Fuzzy Sets and Fuzzy Logic. And over the last year, we both (H. P. and R. S.) had been in close contact with him, communicating many times on the history of AI in Germany and meeting in Munich and Bremen for long and interesting discussions. Born in Offenhausen, Germany, on 26 June 1950, Christian had studied at the Technical University Munich (TUM) and the Max-Planck-Institute (MPI) for Psychiatry before moving to the US. He received a BS in Computer Science from the University of San Francisco (USF) in 1974. While at USF Christian met several computer science pioneers, among them John Backus and Donald Knuth. These meetings and their talks inspired him to travel around the US during and after his studies to visit other labs. Thus, he went to John McCarthy’s Stanford AI Lab, Larry Stark’s Berkeley eye movement lab, the Computer Science Department at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, as well as the MIT’s AI Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During his stay at the MIT, Christian had a chance encounter with Marvin Minsky, whose offer to Christian to take home copies of some of the work being done there on AI resulted in Christian deciding to pursue a doctorate in the field. Christian accepted an offer from the University of California at Berkeley and in 1975 joined their Cognitive Science Program, where Lotfi A. Zadeh became his doctoral supervisor. Christian’s combined interests in artificial intelligence and cognitive science showed in his choice of subjects: while he majored in AI, he also took minors in * Helen Piel h.piel@deutsches‑museum.de Rudolf Seising r.seising@deutsches‑museum.de 1
Deutsches Museum, The Research Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Museumsinsel 1, 80538 Munich, Germany
cognitive psychology and bioengineering. The late 1970s were also seeing the institutionalisation of cognitive science in the US, with a joint interdisciplinary program at Berkeley, funded by the Sloan Foundation, introducing Christian to such figures as George Lakoff, John Searle, and Hubert Dreyfus. In 1981, he received his PhD at the intersection of perception, knowledge representation, and reasoning; the title of his thesis was “Linguistic Pattern Characterization and Analysis”. Because of their common research interest in Fuzzy languages, Christian was in contact with Wolfgang Wahlster who later encouraged him to join Wolfgang Bibel’s AI (or “intellectics”) group at TUM. Christian took up his position in Bibel’s group in 1983, after a 2-year post-doc at the MPI for Psychiatry in Munich where he had been focusing on knowledge representation. He continued this focus at TUM; the
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