Rudolf Wille

His 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.

From 1983, was leader of the research group on Formal concept analysis and from 1993 Chairman of the "Ernst Schröder Center for Conceptual Knowledge Engineering".

The first two are published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science and the latter is a multi-stage conference that produces journal papers.

A leader, inter-disciplinarian, peace activist and prolific mentor, Wille oversaw more than 100 German "Diplom- und Staatsexamenarbeiten" in Mathematics, 51 PhD dissertations, and 8 Postdoctoral "habilitation" qualifications.

Wille 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 Emeritus of Mathematics at TU Dresden: