Ludwig Staiger

Ludwig Staiger is a German mathematician and computer scientist at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg.

He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Jena in 1976; Staiger wrote his doctoral thesis, Zur Topologie der regulären Mengen, under the direction of Gerd Wechsung and Rolf Lindner.

Previously he held positions at the Academy of Sciences in Berlin (East), the Central Institute of Cybernetics and Information Processes, the Karl Weierstrass Institute for Mathematics and the Technical University Otto-von-Guericke Magdeburg. He was a visiting professor at RWTH Aachen University, the universities Dortmund, Siegen, and Cottbus in Germany and the Technical University Vienna, Austria. He is a member of the Managing Committee of the Georg Cantor Association and an external researcher of the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

He co-invented with Klaus Wagner the Staiger–Wagner automaton. Staiger is an expert in ω-languages, an area in which he wrote more than 19 papers including the paper on this topic in the monograph. He found surprising applications of ω-languages in the study of Liouville numbers.

Staiger is an active researcher in combinatorics on words, automata theory, effective dimension theory, and algorithmic information theory.