Researching Klaus Schmidt

After studying mathematics at the University of Vienna he received his doctorate in 1968 under Edmund Hlawka. He held visiting professorships in Technical University of Vienna, University of Manchester in 1969, Bedford College (1969–1974) and the University of Warwick from 1974 to 1994 after which he came back to the University of Vienna. He retired in 2009. In 1975/76K. R. Parthasarathy invited Klaus Schmidt to spend 7 months at the new Delhi Centre of Indian Statistical Institute (Parthasarathy was then working at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi).

In 1994 he was awarded the Ferran Sunyer i Balaguer Prize. He is member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

He has researched among other things, ergodic theory and its connections with arithmetic, commutative algebra, harmonic analysis, operator algebras and probability theory.

Klaus Schmidt studied pre- and protohistory, as well as classical archaeology and geology at the universities of Erlangen and Heidelberg. He completed his doctorate in 1983 at the Heidelberg university under the direction of Harald Hauptmann. He received a travel stipend from the German Archaeological Institute from 1984 to 1986. From 1986 to 1995, he received a research stipend from the German Research Foundation and was employed at the Institute of pre- and proto-history of the Heidelberg university, working on various projects with the German Archaeological Institute and the Heidelberg university.

In 1995, he became the leader of the excavations at Gürcütepe and Göbekli Tepe in Southeast Turkey. He received his habilitation in 1999 from the University of Erlangen and in 2000 became Privatdozent in Pre- and Proto-history at the Institute for Pre- and Proto-history of the University of Erlangen. In 2007, he became adjunct professor at the University of Erlangen.

Starting 2001, he became the referent in prehistoric archaeology of the Oriental division of the German Archaeological Institute, and from 2007 was corresponding member of the Institute.

In 1995, Schmidt purchased a house in nearby Urfa, which became his base of operations. His team of archaeologists typically excavated the site of Göbekli Tepe during two months in the spring and two months in the fall. In a 2011 interview, Schmidt estimated that roughly five percent of the site had been excavated.

Klaus Schmidt was married to Turkish archaeologist Çiğdem Köksal-Schmidt. He died of a heart attack while swimming in Germany on 20 July 2014. Archaeologists intend to continue the excavations at Göbekli Tepe despite Schmidt's death.