Saarland University to award Kurt Mehlhorn the title of Honorary Senator

Kurt Mehlhorn, Professor of Computer Science and former Director of the Max Planck Institute, is to be awarded the title of Honorary Senator of Saarland Universit, Photo: © STK_Minas

Kurt Mehlhorn, Professor of Computer Science and former Director of the Max Planck Institute, is to be awarded the title of Honorary Senator of Saarland University, the highest honour bestowed by the university. The title is reserved for individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the university and society. Media representatives are welcome to attend the award ceremony on 11 November at 6.00 p.m. in the university’s Aula assembly hall.

The following text has been machine translated from the German with no human editing.

As the Senate of Saarland University emphasizes, Professor Kurt Mehlhorn has, in addition to his proven scientific excellence, rendered outstanding services to his field, Saarland University, the local community and society at large. ‘Kurt Mehlhorn has demonstrated his close and enduring connection with Saarland University in an exemplary manner. He is not only an outstanding researcher but has also had a very significant influence on the institutional success story of Computer Science in the Saarland and beyond. Not least, he played a key role in laying the foundations for today’s Saarland Informatics Campus,’ says University President Ludger Santen.

As the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science in Saarbrücken in 1990 – the first and, for a long time, the only Computer Science institute within the Max Planck Society – he created the scientific nucleus for an entire cluster of excellent research institutions that today make up the Saarland Informatics Campus. The promotion of early-career researchers and a broad sense of social responsibility characterize Professor Mehlhorn’s work just as much as his research. He is convinced that science bears social responsibility and that interdisciplinary dialogue on the social dimension of Computer Science is essential. Driven by this conviction, he initiated the introductory lecture series ‘Ideas and Concepts in Computer Science’ at Saarland University, which he has delivered to students from all departments since 2011 – and has continued to do so on a voluntary basis well beyond his retirement in 2019. 

His considerable academic influence is reflected in more than 300 scientific publications and several books, which form part of the core curriculum for today’s computer science students. Equally significant is his role as supervisor to more than 90 doctoral candidates, who now themselves hold leading positions in academia and industry worldwide.

As one of Germany’s most eminent figures in Computer Science, Kurt Mehlhorn has achieved groundbreaking research results in the fields of algorithms, combinatorial optimization and algorithm engineering, which have received the highest international acclaim. His scientific contributions have frequently found their way into practical applications; the best-known example of this is the LEDA library (Library of Efficient Data Types and Algorithms), which he has been developing since 1988 in collaboration with former Ph.D. students. Thousands of institutions and hundreds of companies worldwide – ranging from airlines and automotive groups to the biotechnology sector – have used this software library. It led to the founding of Algorithmic Solutions GmbH together with Stefan Näher and Christian Uhrig.

Key milestones in Kurt Mehlhorn’s career

Kurt Mehlhorn was born in Ingolstadt in 1949. He studied Computer Science and Mathematics at the Technical University of Munich and at Cornell University in Ithaca, USA, where he was awarded his Ph.D. in 1974. In the same year, he joined Saarland University as a research assistant and the university appointed him Professor of Computer Science in 1975 – at the time, the youngest professor of Computer Science in Germany. Günter Hotz, the founding father of computer science in Saarbrücken, appointed Kurt Mehlhorn and strengthened this fledgling field of research with other young talents such as Reinhard Wilhelm and Wolfgang Paul. Kurt Mehlhorn served twice as Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science, was spokesperson for the collaborative research centre (SFB) 124 ‘VLSI Design Methods and Parallelism’ and was involved as a researcher in the Cluster of Excellence ‘Multimodal Computing and Interaction’ and the Saarbrücken Graduate School of Computer Science. 

As the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (MPI) in Saarbrücken in 1990 – which was established a year after the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) – he, together with the DFKI, laid the foundations for further centres of research excellence on the Saarbrücken campus and in northern Saarland (the Leibniz Centre for Computer Science – Dagstuhl Castle). Kurt Mehlhorn was a member of the Senate of the German Research Foundation (DFG), Germany’s leading research funding body. From 2002 to 2008, as Vice-President of the Max Planck Society, he was responsible for one of the world’s leading non-university research organisations. From 2016 to 2022, he served as one of only three Germans on the Scientific Council of the European Research Council (ERC).

Kurt Mehlhorn is also a member of several academies and has received numerous scientific honours. For example, at the age of just 36, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize jointly with Günter Hotz and Wolfgang Paul; this was later followed by the Karl-Heinz-Beckurts Prize and the Konrad-Zuse Medal. In August 2025, Kurt Mehlhorn also received the Saarland Order of Merit – for his ‘outstanding contributions to the Saarland as a centre for computer science and his decades-long commitment to research, teaching and science policy’.

Programme for the conferral of the title of Honorary Senator

The University will confer the title of Honorary Senator in the presence of invited guests on 11 November 2024 at 6.00 p.m. in the University’s auditorium. Two of Kurt Mehlhorn’s former doctoral students will give speeches: computer scientist Hannaneh Akrami, who completed her Ph.D. in 2024, and Christian Uhrig, who received his doctorate back in 1990 and is now managing director of Algorithmic Solutions GmbH. University President Ludger Santen will deliver the laudatory address. The Helmut Eisel & JEM Trio, featuring the internationally renowned Saarbrücken-based clarinettist Helmut Eisel, will provide musical entertainment.