Obituary: Professor Dr. Helmut Thiele (1926-2003)

To the great loss of the scienti)c community, Professor Helmut Thiele has passed away unexpectedly, but peacefully on Friday, January 10, 2003 in his home town of Cologne. He was born on June 20, 1926 in Saratoga. In 1946, he took up a profession as “Neulehrer”, a specially created position as school teacher with a short training, to make up for the lack of teachers after World War II. From 1948 to 1953, he studied Mathematics and Physics at the Universities of Halle=Saale and Berlin. After graduate work in the logic group of Karl Schr= oter, he was awarded a Dr.rer.nat. degree at Humboldt University Berlin in 1958 for a Ph.D. Thesis on the “Theorie der endlichwertigen Lukasiewiczschen Pr= adikatenkalk= ule der ersten Stufe”. His habilitation happened in 1964, also at Berlin’s Humboldt University, based upon a thesis “Wissenschaftstheoretische Untersuchungen in algorithmischen Sprachen I: Theorie der Graphschemata-Kalk= ule”, published as a separate monograph in 1966. Here, Thiele oBered a )rst system of algorithmic (later to be called: dynamic) logic together with a thorough study of its syntactic and semantic aspects.