Karl Steinbuch is one of the founders of Informatik (Computer Science) in Germany and is the father of artificial neuronal networks, well known by his "Lernmatrix" (Learnmatrix), patented already in the 50ies. He is the founder of the discipline, which later Carver Mead has called neuromorphic engineering. Karl Steinbuch is also one of the trailblazers of the Cybernetics movements in the 60ies, now enjoying an overdue revival (see Organic Computing and Transdisciplinary Design and Process). Karl Steinbuch, my former boss and supervisor of my Ph. D.thesis, has been my most valuable mentor in an important time of my professional development. This also holds for about 50 more university professors, being his alumni. Still to-day, the institute* having been founded by Karl Steinbuch in the 50ies at the University of Karlsruhe, enjoys an excellent reputation and highest ranking.

Karl Steinbuch passed away on June 4, 2005, a few days before he would have reached an age of 88***.

It is not sufficient to invent something. You need to recognize, that you have invented something. Karl Steinbuch Prof. Karl Steinbuch 1968, Univ. Karlsruhe * 15. Juni 1917 in Stuttgart-Cannstatt; † 4. Juni 2005 in Ettlingen Links: Karl Steinbuch in Wikipedia, german Karl Steinbuch in Wikipedia, english Karl Steinbuch - Informatiker der ersten Stunde Rektor der Uni KA: Rückblick und Perspektiven Karlsruhe, the cradle of  the  Informatik Also the name of this area: coined by  Steinbuch In 1966 Steinbuch predicts the Mulimedia Age Karl Steinbuch scholarship Prof. Gemmeke with the first European Neurocomputer, completed in 1968 under Steinbuch at Karlsruhe. Steinbuch-based American projects HNC Software Inc. of San Diego has worked in developing cortronic neural networks conceived by its chief scientist Professor Robert  Hecht-Nielsen - based on the work of Karl Steinbuch (here). Also Professor Carver Mead, when working at Caltech on the artificial retina, has frequently quoted Karl Steinbuch's Learnmatrix.

Karl Steinbuch Steinbuch is the inventor of the first practical artificial neural network (ANN) in the world: the Lernmatrix (Learnmatrix). Already in the mid 50ies Steinbuch  has held patents on this. But his papers published at that time - written in German language - have been mostly unknown to American scientists. In the early 60ies an influencial well-known American AI professor had condemned all ANN approaches because of uselessness, which pulled the plug of American research funding on this topic area for almost two decades. The Learnmatrix, however, had provided all the properties requested by this professor already at that time and even earlier.  It has been wrong to ignore Steinbuch for such a long time, writes Prof. Wolfgang Hilberg, TU Darmstadt, in a paper published in 1995** on the history of the Learnmatrix, as well as in his book published in  the year 2000*. Upon invitation byProf. Bernard Widrow, well known by his ADALINE and MADALINE (both ANNs), Prof. Steinbuch has been a visiting professor at Stanford University in 1964. Like Konrad Zuse (who developed a functioning program-controlled computing machine c.1936), Steinbuch has been largely unknown outside Germany, but is a celebrated computer pioneer in his native land.The state governement of Baden-Wuerttemberg in Germany grants quite a number of  „Karl Steinbuch scholarships“ each year. More than a decade before the first CS department has been founded in Germany („Fakultaet fuer Informatik“ in 1969 at University of Karlsruhe) Steinbuch gave regularly scheduled academic courses on these subject areas. Co-author Reiner Hartenstein has been one of his first students at Karlsruhe’s EE department in 1958. Now more than 50 professors are Alumni of Karl Steinbuch. Not only because of having coined the term „Informatik“, the official German word for „Computer Science“, Karl Steinbuch is the father of German Computer Science In 1958 Karl Steinbuch founded the Institut für Nachrichtenverarbeitung (institute for information processing - to-day: ITIV) of the University of Karlsruhe. The term "Informatik" (German translation of "Computer Science") had been coined by Steinbuch: published in1957 (title: Karl Seinbuch: "Informatik: Automatische Informationsverarbeitung"). Before joining the University of Karlsruhe, Karl Steinbuch was director of development at the Stuttgart “Informatik-Werk” of Standard Electric Lorenz AG (SEL); at that time a part of the ITT group. In 1954 he became a strong advocate of the use of transistors instead of vacuum tubes for digital computer product development (this was before silicon transistors became available). Under his leadership, development of the ER-56, Europe’s first fully transistorized digital computer, was completed, and then marketed as a product by SEL. The ER-56 exhibited a dramatic increase in reliability over vacuum tube computers (which typically spent more than 50% of their time in maintenance). Already in 1966 Karl Steinbuch predicted the displacement of  analog techniques by digital techniques, the merging of communication and computing, as well as the merging of entertainment and computing - the multimedia age. [Werner Zorn].  Already 35 years ago Karl Steinbuch predicted Gerrmany’s current economical problems. In the late 60ies his bestsellers "Falsch programmiert" und "Programm 2000" had ranked for months at top positions on the 20 bestseller book list of DER SPIEGEL (kind of German TIMES). *) W. Hilberg: Grosse Herausforderungen in der Informationstechnik - Vom Abenteur der Forschung; 384 S., ISBN. 3-928161-05-9 **) W. Hilberg: Karl Steinbuch, ein zu Unrecht vergessener Pionier der kuenstlichen neuronalen Systeme.  Frequenz 49 (1995) 1-2, S. 28-36  -  pdf ***) Obituaries by the authors Bernard Widrow, Reiner Hartenstein and Robert Hecht-Nielsen have been submitted to the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Newsletter, August 2005, IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Magazine, first issue of this new magazine, to appear in 2006, and to Nature. © copyright 1999, 2008, Reiner Hartenstein Dangling Links Please, excuse some dangling links, which had been o.k. for the 1999  first version of this page. We are working to fix it.