Obituary for Max Hadersbeck (29.10.1956-2.7.2020)
Max was a dear friend, and the contribution he and his programming students made towards increasing the accessibility of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass has been invaluable. We met about a decade ago when he approached me at a conference in Munich and asked whether he could use our Wittgenstein Nachlass transcriptions for his computational linguistics teaching at the Munich LMU Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS). We quickly became friends, and remained so both personally and professionally. Max often said to me: “Miar miasn zomholtn.” A close cooperation creating tools for Wittgenstein Nachlass search - the Wittgenstein Advanced Search Tools - developed, pooling together the Bergen Wittgenstein Archives' transcriptions and facsimiles of the Nachlass and CIS' programming and computational linguistics skills as well as their grammatically encoded digital lexicon of the German language. One of the most valuable and exciting fruits of our cooperation was the online Wittgenstein Nachlass search tool WiTTFind, work resulting from and in about a dozen Bachelor and Master theses at CIS. The enthusiasm and motivation Max was able to convey to his students was extraordinary, and the Wittgenstein Advanced Search Tools received a number of awards. We had the chance of giving many joint presentations of ongoing WiTTFind work, among others in Kirchberg at the annual International Wittgenstein Symposium. This was always a great joy. For the anniversary symposium 2021 Max was already on the list of invited speakers. Max died on July 2nd, 2020, only a few months after receiving a cancer diagnosis. We all miss you terribly, Max. You have been a shining sun in our life.
Alois Pichler
Max was a dear friend, and the contribution he and his programming students made towards increasing the accessibility of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass has been invaluable. We met about a decade ago when he approached me at a conference in Munich and asked whether he could use our Wittgenstein Nachlass transcriptions for his computational linguistics teaching at the Munich LMU Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS). We quickly became friends, and remained so both personally and professionally. Max often said to me: “Miar miasn zomholtn.” A close cooperation creating tools for Wittgenstein Nachlass search - the Wittgenstein Advanced Search Tools - developed, pooling together the Bergen Wittgenstein Archives' transcriptions and facsimiles of the Nachlass and CIS' programming and computational linguistics skills as well as their grammatically encoded digital lexicon of the German language. One of the most valuable and exciting fruits of our cooperation was the online Wittgenstein Nachlass search tool WiTTFind, work resulting from and in about a dozen Bachelor and Master theses at CIS. The enthusiasm and motivation Max was able to convey to his students was extraordinary, and the Wittgenstein Advanced Search Tools received a number of awards. We had the chance of giving many joint presentations of ongoing WiTTFind work, among others in Kirchberg at the annual International Wittgenstein Symposium. This was always a great joy. For the anniversary symposium 2021 Max was already on the list of invited speakers. Max died on July 2nd, 2020, only a few months after receiving a cancer diagnosis. We all miss you terribly, Max. You have been a shining sun in our life.
Alois Pichler