Writings by Uwe Lück

Born April 29, 1962; grown up in the lovely town of Gernsbach (Black Forest, see my brother’s photographs) studied psychology, analytical philosophy, logic (mathematical/philosophical), philosophy of science, and mathematics; Dipl.-Math. (math diploma, thesis on space forms and relativistic cosmology, also concerning indistinguishability according to Glymour and Malament in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science VIII); main efforts in probability and statistics, theory of measurement, interpersonal comparisons of utility, foundations of mathematics, category theory. My doctoral thesis is concerned with foundations of measurement which has kept my interest since I learnt of psychophysics at the beginning of my psychological studies. 2003–2005, I worked for a research project on the history of ordinal analysis (Gentzen-style proof theory) and its implications for the philosophy of mathematics. As a by-product, a (German) article on Hilbert’s Finitism (co-authored with Christian Tapp) appeared in the Selected Papers Contributed to the Sections of GAP.5. — Passionate (La)TeX macro writer (i.e., I develop modules for certain typesetting software). My main work in this respect has been ednotes for typesetting critical editions, developped for Christian Tapp in the course of the named project, in the meantime used by several others.

Afterwards, I have worked for two volumes of the German complete edition of works by and about Nicolaus Copernicus (Akademie-Verlag, Berlin). In 2007, a critical edition of a manuscript containing an early German translation of Copernicus’ main work, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (Latin original title: De revolutionibus orbium coelestum), appeared, made by J. Hamel and A. Kühne, with ednotes (having contributed to deciphering and scrutinizing the translation, I am named as a minor co-author).

Then resources for the Copernicus project were cut off, I did some math tutoring, worked a little as a TeX consultant, made some new macro packages, was hired for creating a system for typesetting critical editions from XML files … and fired. (I had moved from Munich to Pfeddersheim for this — not so bad!) Afterwards, I could extend ednotes with some new output routine tricks, and this somehow triggered more and more packages (my own list differs a little) … among them, tools to generate web pages with TeX. Maintaining the present pages now resembles writing LaTeX documents as well as editing Wikipedia articles (see a table). I have also used this method for beamer presentations (i.e., the “slides” a parts of a long HTML page — blogdot.sty, e.g., fifinddo-info).

In 2013, I could by hired again for completing the last volume of the Copernicus edition in Munich.

Once I played chess and music (classic, jazz) very eagerly. In 2007 and 2008, I spent (wasted?) much time for editing articles of the German Wikipedia, mainly on amateur subjects, rather competently only on Kurt Gödel — cf. my Wikipedia homepage.

Uwe Lück died in June 2020.

Webmaster: Rainer Lück, Gernsbach
Supported by: A la Siesta Hängematten und Kunsthandwerk, Wismar