Rudolf Wille, German mathematician, Died at 79

  Educator

Rudolf Wille was born on November 2, 1937, and died on January 22, 2017.

He was a German mathematician.

He was the professor of General Algebra from 1970 to 2003 at Technische Universität Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt).

Wille’s most celebrated work is the invention of Formal concept analysis, an unsupervised machine learning technique that applies mathematical lattice theory to organize data based on objects and their shared attributes.

He authored more than 250 scientific publications and co-authored the highly cited and influential textbook on Formal concept analysis with his longtime collaborator (and former PhD student) Bernhard Ganter who is now Professor of Mathematics at TU Dresden.

Rudolf Wille passed away at 79 years old.