Gerd Binnig

Gerd Binnig (born July 20, 1947) is a German physicist, and a Nobel laureate.

He was born in Frankfurt am Main and played in the ruins of the city during his childhood. His family lived partly in Frankfurt and partly in Offenbach, and he attended school in both cities. At the age of 10, he decided to become a physicist, but he soon wondered whether he had made the right choice. He concentrated more on music, playing in a band. He also started playing the violin at 15 and played in his school orchestra.

In 1969, he married Lore Wagler, a psychologist, and they have a daughter born in Switzerland and a son born in California. His hobbies are reading, swimming and golf.

In 1978, he accepted an offer from IBM to join their Zürich research group. There, he met Heinrich Rohrer, with whom he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986 for their design of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM).

The team included Christoph Gerber and Edmund Weibel, and they were soon recognized with a number of prizes: the German Physics Prize, the Otto Klung Prize, the Hewlett Packard Prize, the King Faisal Prize, and ultimately, the Nobel Prize.

In 1994 Professor Gerd Binnig founded Definiens which turned in the year 2000 into a commercial enterprise. Today, companies and institutions around the world use Definiens' technology to maximize the value of images and thereby enabling better decisions. Definiens currently focuses on applications for Life Sciences and Earth Sciences. In Life Sciences, Definiens' technology is used to accelerate the drug discovery, development, and diagnostics processes. In Earth Sciences, Definiens' technology enables satellite and aerial image classification and analysis with greater speed, accuracy and insight.