Obituary: Fritz Ackermann

Sadly, Prof Dr Fritz Ackermann passed away at the age of 92 on 4 December 2021. He was a professor of photogrammetry and surveying at the University of Stuttgart in Germany from 1966 to 1992. He was also founder and director of the Institute for Photogrammetry at the same university.

In 1958 he started his scientific career at the world-famous ITC, Delft, the Netherlands, which is presently a faculty of the University of Twente, the Netherlands. His in-depth scientific research as a professor in Stuttgart was greatly inspired by the theoretical concepts developed by him and his fellow researchers at ITC. His significant impact on the developments and progress in analytical and digital photogrammetry was further impelled by one of his major objectives, namely to convert research results into successful practical applications, particularly through software development. The resulting high-standard software packages such as PAT-M, PAT-B and MATCH-T, were considered the cream of the crop worldwide and found their way into practice through his institute and the firm Inpho GmbH (today part of Trimble), which he founded in 1980.

To convey recent developments in photogrammetry to practitioners, he regularly contributed feature articles to GIM International. His contributions to photogrammetry have been recognized worldwide. He received honorary doctorates from multiple institutes, including the University Wuhan and University of Moscow. The 26 PhD students he supervised over the years as well as many others will remember him as the 'Father of Modern Photogrammetry'.