On the 4th of January 2005 Frank-Olme Ewald Speck celebrated his 60th birthday, thirty-one years after he received his doctorate in Mathematics (Dr. rer. nat.), twenty-one years after his habilitation, both at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt (THD), and fifteen years after his arrival at Instituto Superior Técnico, where he became Invited Full Professor in the Department of Mathematics.
Although F.-O. Speck was born in Breslau, two weeks after his birth his family moved to Berlin,where he lived with his mother and brothers until the age of twenty five. F.-O. Speck did his graduate studies in Mathematics at the Technische Universität Berlin, where he finished his Diplom in 1970 under the guidance of Professor Erhard Meister and where he got his first Assistant position, for one semester. He spent the next nineteen years in the group of Professor Meister, the first four years as an Assistant in Tübingen, at the Mathematische Institut, and the remaining fifteen as Hochschulassistent, Researcher and Privatdozent at the Fachbereich Mathematik of the THD. During the academic year of 1989/90, Frank-Olme Speck was Associate Professor at the Mathematics Departments of the Stuttgart and Kaiserslautern Universities, in the winter and summer terms, respectively.