Michael was a software developer and Atlantis researcher from Bonn (Germany). He devoted much of his time to the Atlantis localization problem. To solve the puzzle of the philosopher he created a formal method which he named geographical hierarchical constraint satisfaction (GHCS). This method and his tireless empirical work led to the Souss-Massa location hypothesis and subsequently to many exciting discoveries. Tragically, he died in a traffic accident in 2013, shortly before his research gained worldwide attention (see page Media Coverage for details).