Altmann was born on 24 May 1931 in
Poltár,
Czechoslovakia. He spent much of his career as a professor at
Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. Over his long career, Altmann authored numerous books and articles focused on
quantitative linguistics. He served as the founding editor of the book series
Quantitative Linguistics, which publishes works on all aspects of quantitative methods and models in linguistics. He was also on the editorial boards of several journals in the field, such as
Journal of Quantitative Linguistics. Altmann made key contributions to establishing the fundamental principles of quantitative linguistics. In addition to his work on Menzerath's law, he helped develop a unified derivation of several
linguistic laws. His research applied mathematical and statistical methods to analyze various facets of language, from word length distributions to syntactic structures. == Works ==