January 13 2020 was the day professor Rutter finally could no longer avoid facing the harsh questioning of “Professors in Person”.

As usual we first examined his personal life a bit closer: Ignaz Rutter was born in Karlsruhe in 1981 where he experienced a radiant childhood thanks to the nearby nuclear power plant. In 2001 he began to study computer science, a task which took him only the standard amount of six years. Even before he was conferred his doctorate he wrote his first publication which had an astonishingly close connection to his diploma thesis. However, said publication could at first not exactly be called public as it was apparently “poorly written”. Furthermore, initial correspondence related to his thesis showed great latency which could not possibly have been due to an intentionally ignored e-mail, no, it must have somehow landed in the spam folder. Happens to the best of the academic year.

In 2007 Ignaz Rutter started working with the academic chair and obtained his doctorate four years later. Subsequently he initiated his wandering years which led him to Prague in 2013 and 2014. Afterwards he arrived in Frankfurt where he was responsible for the lecture Data Structures until 2016, when he continued on towards the Netherlands, specifically Eindhoven, a place he choose to stay half a year longer than necessary in out of consideration for his family before finally coming to us here in Passau.

Professor Rutter’s research concerns planar graphs - those that can be drawn in a plane without their edges intersecting. A more specific question in this field is whether a certain graph can be drawn in the aforementioned manner when a part of said graph is already correctly drawn and cannot be changed. This question is of interest when it comes to graphs that need to be expanded, for example. One approach to this problem is to check whether graphs contain certain “forbidden substructures”, which are already known to be impossible to draw in the desired way. Professor Rutter has been working on this open question for seven or eight years now.

In Addition to that he also works on optimizing the calculation of traffic routes and he has cooperated with philosophers as well. One instance was about building a layouter for argument maps and another time they analysed the spread of fake news on Twitter.

Ignaz Rutter wanted to become a professor because he has fun doing research and received a job offer from his mentor. The final decision was made about a year (and a half) after he had gained his doctorate. What he likes about Passau is having the most beautiful place to live in so far, which, however, does not mean that much, as he has said himself. For his research he also traveled to India and Japan. As most computer scientists he enjoys programming, as confirmed by the two-player graph drawing game made in 2013. His other hobbies include the DLRG, theatre, squash, chess and board games with the kids. He also plays the piano and the guitar but he is not much of an artist despite his mother being active in this area.

We are happy to have a competent professor at our university who is additionally not afraid to make it rain sweets near the end of the semester at exam preparation time. One thing is for sure: Without Ignaz Rutter, Passau would loose a professional hard disk throwing champion.