Lutz Wegner started his career with fundamental research on two-level grammars, also known as
van Wijngaarden grammars which had been used to define the programming language Algol68.
His results were included in the Handbook of Formal Languages by Arto Salomaa and Grzegorz Rozenberg.[2]
For his second thesis he developed variants of Quicksort suitable for multiset and proved that they
achieved the lower bound for quicksort algorithms previously given by Robert Sedgewick.
Following a sabbatical stay at the IBM Scientific Center Heidelberg he took an interest in the Non-First Normal-Form data model, also known as nested relational model, and designed a graphical editor which also served as base for
research on synchronous groupware.[3] In 1986 he authored an E-learning course "Introduction to Unix", which
originally was a contribution to Hermann Maurer's COSTOC-Project, and with
several portings was in active use until 2015, thus constituting one of the longest running examples
of courseware.
Besides his scientific achievements Wegner was instrumental in introducing computer science studies
(Bachelor and Master) at the University of Kassel which started in 2001 after securing three additional,
sponsored professorships with Traudl Herrhausen, then a member of the Hessian Parliament, opening doors to
industry and charities.[4]
Notable publications
Lutz M. Wegner: On Parsing Two-level Grammars Acta Informatica 14 (1980) pp. 175–193 doi:10.1007/BF00288543
Lutz M. Wegner: Quicksort for Equal Keys. IEEE Trans. Comput. 34:4 (1985) pp. 362–366 doi:10.1109/TC.1985.5009387.
Jukka Teuhola and Lutz Wegner: Minimal Space, Average Linear Time Duplicate Deletion. Comm. ACM 34:3 (1991) pp. 62–73 doi:10.1145/102868.102872.
^A. Mateescu and A. Salomaa: Wijngaarden (two-level) grammars. in Handbook of Formal Languages, Vol. 1, G. Rozenberg and A. Salomaa (Eds.), Springer 1997, S. 210-217.
