Mourning for Prof. em. Reiner Hartenstein

The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the KIT Faculty of Computer Science,
and the Institute of Information Processing Technology mourn the death of

Professor em. Dr. Reiner Hartenstein,

who passed away on June 24, 2022, at the age of 87.

Professor Hartenstein was a pioneer of hardware description languages, reconfigurable computing, and reconfigurable supercomputing. He accompanied the KIT Faculty of Computer Science already in its early days and, after his appointment to the University of Kaiserslautern, had shaped the development of the Department of Computer Science there.

Reiner Hartenstein had studied communications engineering at the then University of Karlsruhe (TH), today's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), until 1959 and received his PhD in 1969 in the field of automatic character recognition under Professor Karl Steinbuch. As a member of Prof. Winfried Görke's research group, he had witnessed the founding of the Faculty of Computer Science in Karlsruhe and distinguished himself by teaching and publishing his first scientific papers in the then still young subject of computer science.

In 1977, he had received a call to the University of Kaiserslautern, where he helped establish the Department of Computer Science and became one of the formative heads of Computer Science in Kaiserslautern.
Prof. Hartenstein's scientific achievements were mainly in the fields of register transfer simulation and reconfigurable computer architectures. This work was groundbreaking and brought him great recognition in the scientific community, both nationally and internationally. Even beyond his retirement, he was valued as a speaker at high-level conferences.

Our thoughts and deepest sympathies are with his family and loved ones during these difficult times. We will always cherish his memory.