News Release

Professor Heinz-Otto Peitgen awarded German Start-up Prize

Springer editor and bestselling author wins in category 'Visionary'

Grant and Award Announcement

Springer

Prof. Heinz-Otto Peitgen received this year's Deutscher Gründerpreis (German Start-up Prize) in the category "Visionary" at an awards ceremony in Berlin on September 12. Peitgen is the founder and Managing Director of the Bremen-based MeVis Group. The mathematician has successfully put his interdisciplinary scientific work into business practice. His unique new software enables medical professionals to create three-dimensional images of organs or vessels, significantly improving early diagnosis and therapy of cancer and treatment of tumors. His company, the MeVis Group, employs more than 100 people, including mathematicians, doctors, computer scientists, engineers, and other scientists. The award honors Peitgen's vision in the service of societal progress.

Prof. Peitgen first published work with Springer in the early 1980s, building up a worldwide reputation with his publications on chaos and fractals. His book The Beauty of Fractals, published by Springer in 1986, was a global bestseller, translated into many languages. He now mainly publishes in Springer's scientific journals such as European Radiology and Langenbeck's Archives of Surgery. "We are very proud of such an outstanding author as Heinz-Otto Peitgen, with whom we have been linked for over twenty years by the publication of books and articles. He has succeeded in providing his services as a scientist directly to humanity, in a most remarkable way," commented Dr. Joachim Heinze, head of Springer's Mathematics & Computer Science program. Alongside his business activities, Prof. Pleitgen also holds a chair at the University of Bremen and is Director of its Center for Complex Systems and Visualization (CeVis). He is the editor of the Springer series Fractals Classroom Strategic Activities and co-author of The Beauty of Fractals Lab (1994) and Chaos And Fractals (2004).

The German Start-up Prize has been awarded since 2002, in the categories Concept, Newcomer, Visionary and Life's Work. The companies Geohumus International GmbH from Frankfurt and the Nuremberg-based Hotel.de AG were awarded the prizes for Concept and Newcomer. The Start-up Prize for Life's Work went to Werner and Michael Otto.

The prizes are awarded to entrepreneurs who show outstanding initiative, daring, and responsibility, combined with top performance in their given field. Companies are nominated by experts and selected by a jury. Innovative ideas, a positive corporate culture and visionary start-up ideas are the key criteria for award-winners. The aim of the awards is to contribute towards a positive development of the start-up culture in Germany, recognize above-average entrepreneurial commitment and highlight role models for up-and-coming businesspeople.

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