In Memoriam: Ingo Wegener

With deep sadness, we had to realize that our co-editor and co-founder of the theory track, Ingo Wegener, has died on the 26th of November 2008 after a long fight with cancer. His death is a tragic loss for all who knew him, friends, colleagues and students. Ingo Wegener was born on the 4th of December 1950 in Bremen, Germany. He was a full professor at the Technische Universität Dortmund, leading a strong and influential group on efficient algorithms and complexity theory. He and his group contributed to many research areas. Their fundamental results on the complexity of Boolean functions and on the theory of evolutionary computation had an enormous impact. Ingo Wegener received numerous honors. Being appointed to the German Council of Science and Humanities as well as receiving the most important and prestigious German award for computer scientists, the Konrad-Zuse-Medaille, are just two examples. In the field of evolutionary computation, Ingo Wegener established a completely new research direction. He started analyzing evolutionary algorithms by purely theoretical means. To substantiate a claim, we would look for a mathematical proof, valid for all inputs, rather than experimentally analyzing a limited number of examples. Unlike in the classical theory of algorithms community, this approach was uncommon of in the field of evolutionary computation. With persistence and with convincing results he succeeded in getting his mathematical approach become a recognized direction in the field. Less than ten years