Obituary Prof. Bischoff

On December 15, 2020, Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Helmut Bischoff has passed away at the age of 82.

Prof. Bischoff was born in Berlin in 1938. After graduating from high school in 1956, he followed his youthful urge for electrical engineering with initially tangible training experiences as an electron tube builder at the Berlin Telecommunications Technology Plant. In the end, however, his intellectual approach to electrical engineering prevailed and he decided to study engineering at the Technical University of Dresden in 1957, obviously at exactly the right time. The new field of control engineering was given a distinctive face throughout Germany (East and West) by Prof. Kindler with the establishment of his own institute. This spirit of optimism and the charismatic personality of Prof. Kindler were probably decisive for Helmut Bischoff's later professional focus on the most exciting field of all for him - control engineering. Following his diploma thesis in 1963, he became an assistant at the Institute for Control Engineering under Prof. Kindler. After successfully completing his doctorate with a thesis on "Sampled-Data Systems with Limited Manipulated Variables", he took the next academic step in 1969 as a senior assistant in the WB Control Engineering and Process Control. In addition to excellent teaching, Prof. Bischoff dedicated himself very dedicatedly and successfully to the development of computer tools, which allowed not only program development and software code generation for AT devices, but also the simulation of the control code together with its technical environment.

In 1988 he was appointed a.o. Lecturer and he received the title of apl. Professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in 1992. In the post-reunification transition period, he led the Institute of Automation as the executive head of the institute from 1992 -1994. In the years 1994-1997 he rendered outstanding services as Dean of Studies in Electrical Engineering. In this task, which was new for the faculty at that time, he successfully initiated the first new study documents for the Electrical Engineering program with prudence and great skill, up to the preparations for a Master's program in Electrical Engineering.

As a university teacher he was highly appreciated by the students until his retirement in 2003 and he inspired many generations for this field and was always open-minded for new areas, for example the first big wave of knowledge-based systems in the 1990s.
I am personally very grateful to Professor Bischoff for the many helpful and edifying scientific discussions, his collegiality and commitment, and his unconditional loyalty.

The staff of the Institute of Automation will keep the memory of our long-time university teacher and colleague, Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Helmut Bischoff, always.

Prof. Dr.techn. Klaus Janschek Institute for Automation, 17.12.2020