Category:Famous Technical University of Munich Alumni
The Technical University of Munich is Germany's oldest technical university, and its roster here is short but unusually top-heavy: almost every established member holds a Nobel Prize or founded a company that changed computing. The laureates cover physics, chemistry and physiology or medicine. Beside them sit the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the researcher behind the recurrent neural network architecture that carried natural language processing through the 2010s. The remainder of the roster is a recent cohort of German software founders building industrial automation, which is a direct reflection of the economy the university sits inside.
Background
TUM was founded in Munich in 1868 as a polytechnic school and is organised around engineering, the natural sciences, medicine and management. It is a state university in Bavaria, at the centre of Germany's manufacturing and automotive economy, and it operates the Center for Digital Technology and Management jointly with the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich as a route into entrepreneurship.
The membership divides cleanly by era. The senior members did their prize-winning work in the second half of the twentieth century, usually outside Germany. The junior members founded companies in the past three years, usually in San Francisco.
The laureates
Erwin Neher developed the patch clamp technique with Bert Sakmann, making it possible to record the tiny electrical currents flowing through individual ion channels in living cells, and shared the 1991 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for it. Wolfgang Ketterle led one of the first groups to achieve Bose-Einstein condensation in a dilute atomic gas in 1995 and shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics with Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman; his laboratory at MIT went on to achieve record-low temperatures and build atom lasers.
Gerhard Ertl established the experimental and theoretical foundations of modern surface chemistry, explaining at molecular level how catalytic converters clean exhaust and why iron rusts, and received the 2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on his seventy-first birthday. Joachim Frank developed the computational methods behind single-particle cryo-electron microscopy and shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Jacques Dubochet and Richard Henderson.
Computing and the industrial founders
Andy Bechtolsheim co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 as its chief hardware designer, wrote one of the first cheques to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and later co-founded Arista Networks. Jürgen Schmidhuber co-developed long short-term memory networks, the recurrent architecture that dominated natural language processing through the 2010s, and has contributed to meta-learning, generative adversarial networks and linear transformers from IDSIA in Lugano.
The recent members are working on a narrower problem than either of them, and on the same one as each other. Jiehua Wu and Almo Sutedjo co-founded Comena, which builds artificial intelligence agents to automate order entry for industrial distributors and manufacturers. Berni Hausleitner co-founded Soff, which builds artificial intelligence agents for distributors and manufacturers, and met his co-founder at the Center for Digital Technology and Management in Munich. Dominik Moehrle co-founded Dodo, which builds the same kind of agent for specialty medical clinics. All of them automate back-office work in the industries Munich actually has.
See also
This category currently contains no pages or media.