Rudolf Wille

Rudolf Wille (2 November 1937 – 22 January 2017) was a German mathematician. He was professor of General Algebra from 1970 to 2003 at Darmstadt University of Technology. His best known work was the invention of Formal concept analysis. This is a method to find structures in data, based on objects and their shared attributes. It uses "mathematical lattice theory". 
Wille was born in Bremen on 2 November 1937. He died on 22 January 2017 in Bickenbach, Hesse. He was 79.