Werner Zorn (born 24 September 1942, in Frankfurt am Main) is a German computer scientist and Internet pioneer.

From 2001 to 2007, he was a professor of communication systems at the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam, previously working at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology as the head of a computer center and a professor.

Life 
Zorn, who was the son of professor , attended primary school in Bad Soden from 1949 to 1953, then the Leibniz Realgymnasium in Frankfurt. After graduating in 1962, he studied at the Technical University of Karlsruhe, specializing in communications engineering and graduated with a degree in engineering in 1967. He then earned his doctorate, with his instructor being Karl Steinbuch, with the thesis Setting method for linear and non-linear classifiers (German: Einstellverfahren für lineare und nichtlineare Klassifikatoren) in the field of character recognition.

In 1972, he moved to the newly founded Department of Computer Science of the University of Karlsruhe (TH), where he was responsible for the development, operation and further development of the Informatik-Rechnerabteilung (IRA) data center for 25 years. After his appointment as a professor in 1979, he chose the topics of methodological performance analysis and data communication as one of his main fields, which he has continued to pursue ever since.

With the first German Internet email in 1984, the connection of China to the international computer networks in 1987, the founding of the company Xlink in 1989 as one of the first German Internet service providers, Zorn set a number of early milestones for the Internet internationally.

In his capacity as Admin-C for the domain "germany" with the e-mail address zorn@germany, Zorn was involved in the establishment of an open network of different computer networks in the German scientific field (CSNET, EARN, EUnet and others). He came into conflict with the German Research Network DFN and became the main critic of its funding policy, which was strictly OSI-oriented and against the TCP/IP-based Internet. This Internet-OSI Standards War lasted until the early 1990s.

After moving to the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) at the University of Potsdam in 2001, Zorn devoted himself to the problem of hierarchically consistent modeling of communication systems in teaching and research, resulting, in particular, in 2007 in a methodologically novel approach to the quantitative analysis of discrete dynamical systems.

Awards (selection) 
 2006: Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
 2013: Inductee in the Internet Hall of Fame in the Pioneers Category
 2014: Chinese Government Friendship Award
 2016: Ehrenmitglied der Leibniz-Sozietaet der Wissenschaften zu Berlin.

Publications (selection) 
 1985 Neueste Netznachrichten Sonderausgabe  März 1985
 1988 Wie China mit den internationalen Rechnernetzen verbunden wurde
 1995	mit Martin Haas: Methodische Leistungsanalyse von Rechensystemen. Handbuch für Informatik 2.6, A. Endres, H. Krallmann, P. Schnupp (Hrsg.). Oldenbourg Verlag, München
 1996 Endet das Internet im Chaos? ,  Deutscher Internet Kongress 1996 in Karlsruhe, Mai 1996
 1997 Hat Deutschland die Internet-Entwicklung verschlafen? ,  Deutscher Internet Kongress 1997 in Düsseldorf, Mai 1997
 1998 Über die verfehlte deutsche Internet- Entwicklung
 2007 FMC-QE - A New Approach in Quantitative Modeling (PDF; 308 kB)
 2016 Von der Nützlichkeit verständlicher Begriffsdefinitionen am Beispiel „Information“. In: Fuchs-Kittowski, Frank; Kriesel, Werner (Hrsg.): Informatik und Gesellschaft. Festschrift zum 80. Geburtstag von Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski. Frankfurt a. M., Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien: Peter Lang Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, PL Academic Research,  (Print), E- (E-Book).
Musik & Informatik
 1988  Musik und Informatik - ein Brückenschlag, Fassung vom 25. März 1988 (Eigenpublikation)
 1995 Semesterkonzerts des Collegium Musicum der Universität Karlsruhe,  11. Februar 1995  Dirigent: Hubert Heitz,  Solist: Werner Zorn, Klavier
 George Enescu – 2e Rhapsodie Roumaine op. 11 Nr. 2; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Konzert für Klavier und Orchester Nr. 19 F-Dur KV 459 (ab Minute 13:00)   
George Gershwin – Rhapsody in blue; George Enescu – 1re Rhapsodie Roumaine op. 11 Nr 1 (ab Minute 39:50)

External links 
 
 Curriculum Vitae
 Erste E-Mail nach Deutschland
 Veröffentlichungen
 History of XLINK
 Vor 20 Jahren: Deutscher Internet-Pionier schließt China ans Netz an (PDF; 65 kB) – HPI press release with background information, September 18, 2007, last accessed on January 1, 2016

References

1942 births
Living people
Scientists from Frankfurt
Academic staff of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Academic staff of the University of Potsdam
German computer scientists
Recipients of the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
Internet pioneers