Matthias ettrich

Matthias Ettrich, (Bietigheim, Germany, June 14, 1972), is a computer scientist who created the LyX software and founder of the KDE project.

Biography

Ettrich went to school in Beilstein as he lived with his parents in Oberstenfeld not far from his birthplace. He passed the Abitur in 1991 and studied for his Master of Computer Science at the Wilhelm Schickard Institute for Computing, He attended the Eberhard Karls University Tübingen.

Ettrich also founded the LyX project in 1995, as a project for the university. LyX is a graphical front-end to LaTeX. LyX's main platform was Linux, and Ettrich thought about improving the graphical interface, leading to the start of the KDE project. In 1996 he proposed the creation of a desktop environment for Unix systems that would be "consistent, pleasant and free"; using the Qt library. Currently, LyX runs on other operating systems.

Since 1998 he has been director of software development at Trolltech in Oslo (Norway), with responsibility for Qt and its development team.

Awards and recognitions

In 2009, Ettrich was awarded the German Federal Cross of Merit for his contribution to Free Software.