Dedication to a Theory of Modelling

Bernhard Thalheim’s personal website at Christian-Albrechts-University shows a logo that is meant to illustrate the activities of his research group named “Technology of Information Systems”. The logo shows a triangle with

Information

in the centre, and

Content

,

Concept

and

Topic

at the three corners. If we were to suggest a logo that illustrates the scientific works and ambitions of Bernhard Thalheim, we would place

Modelling

into the centre of the triangle, and label the corners with

Theory

,

Methods

and

Applications

. So far, Bernhard’s scientific life led him from mathematics and pure theoretical computer science over database theory to the design of information systems. What looks on the surface like a movement from one end of computer science to another is de facto the enrichment of a global picture, which ultimately aims at a general theory of modelling. In the sense of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Bernhard Thalheim has developed himself as a virtuoso for playing with the dialectic antipodes of theory and practice bringing theoretical results into applications and extracting challenging questions from applications in order to shift scientific knowledge to a higher level as kind of “negated negation”. Most recently, he has explicitly declared his ambitions to develop a theory of modelling in an interdisciplinary setting that brings together researchers from mathematics, sciences, economics, engineering and humanities.