Rainer Storn

Also known as Rainer M. Storn

Rainer Storn is an electrical engineer who co-invented Differential Evolution, a method for global numerical optimization that is simple to implement. After a doctorate at the University of Stuttgart in 1990 and research work at Siemens in Munich, he held a fellowship at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley from 1994. In 1995, during that stay, he and Ken Price devised Differential Evolution, and they described it in 1997 articles and in a 2005 Springer book written with Jouni Lampinen. The IEEE Computational Intelligence Society gave him its Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award in 2017. He specializes in software-defined radios at Rohde & Schwarz in Germany, where he is Director of R&D Platform Software.

Now at: Rohde & Schwarz GmbH & Co KG
Works: 49
Citations: 42,661
h-index: 14
Badges: Bridge
Loyal

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

1979–1990

EUROTRONIK and a Stuttgart PhD

In 1979, he is among the first 15 winners of the European circuit contest EUROTRONIK. He earns a diploma in electrical engineering at the University of Stuttgart in 1984, and in 1990 a PhD summa cum laude at its Institut für Netzwerk- und Systemtheorie, with a thesis on the discrete Fourier transform for the fast convolution of real-valued signals.
By 1992

Siemens research in Munich

He works at the central research facilities of Siemens AG in Munich, first on a multiprocessor-based connectionless server architecture for Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technology, and lectures on queuing theory at the University of Innsbruck. In 1992, he is assigned head of software development, supervising 12 engineers in metropolitan area networks.
1994

A fellowship at ICSI Berkeley

In 1994, he is granted a postdoctoral fellowship, followed by a Senior Visitor Leave grant, at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley. There he works on the first transatlantic ATM network, between the USA and Germany.
1995

Inventing differential evolution

In 1995, during his stay at ICSI, he and Ken Price invent Differential Evolution, first published as ICSI Technical Report TR-95-012. Several papers on DE follow in quick succession.
1997

Dr. Dobb's article and journal paper

In April 1997, Price and Storn publish the article Differential Evolution in Dr. Dobb's Journal, presenting DE as an exceptionally simple evolution strategy whose main search engine takes less than 20 lines of C code. Their paper on a simple and efficient heuristic for global optimization over continuous spaces appears in the Journal of Global Optimization in 1997.
2005

A Springer book on DE

Springer publishes Differential Evolution: A Practical Approach to Global Optimization in 2005, in its Natural Computing Series, by Kenneth Price, Rainer Storn and Jouni Lampinen. The book presents DE as a practical approach to global numerical optimization that is easy to understand, simple to implement, reliable and fast.
2017

Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award

In 2017, he and Kenneth Price receive the Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.
Since 2005

Software-defined radios at Rohde & Schwarz

Since 2005, he specializes in software-defined radios at Rohde & Schwarz and helps build professional radios for the airborne market, where design assurance standards such as DO-178C and DO-254 apply. He is Director of R&D Platform Software at Rohde & Schwarz GmbH & Co KG in Germany. He has also applied DE in industrial applications and helped include it in several commercial software packages.