Prof. Hans-Peter Kriegel is the most cited German computer scientist, 2010
Hans-Peter Kriegel is the most cited computer scientist in Germany. This is the result of evaluations of the two worldwide citation databases "Microsoft Academic Search" and "CiteSeer". Compared to all German computer scientists Hans-Peter Kriegel's publications were the most cited ones. His more than 350 publications were cited more than 8000 times.
According to the number of worldwide citations, Hans-Peter Kriegel is on one level with David A. Patterson, the inventor of the VLSI technology used in Microsystems' famous SPARC processors or with Leslie Lamport, the inventor of the text processing program LaTeX. In 2009, Hans-Peter Kriegel was appointed as an ACM Fellow for contributions to knowledge discovery and data mining, similarity search, spatial data management, and access methods for high-dimensional data as first ACM Fellow from a Bavarian university or research institute.
The most cited publication of Hans-Peter Kriegel dates back to the year 1990. Together with coauthors he suggested the R*-tree, a dynamic spatial index structure to support efficient search of multidimensional extended objects. By minimizing the overlap of page regions, less subtrees have to be searched thus improving query performance. It is not surprising that this index structure is implemented in wide spread industrial products such as the database systems Oracle and SQLite. The concept of the R*-tree is also explained in Wikipedia with a reference to Hans-Peter Kriegel and his coauthors.
