Jan van Leeuwen (born December 17, 1946, in

Waddinxveen Waddinxveen () is a town and municipality along the Gouwe river in the western Netherlands in the province of South Holland near Gouda. The municipality had a population of in and covers an area of of which is water. A small piece of artwork ...

) is a Dutch

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus ( ...

and Emeritus professor of computer science at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at

Utrecht University Utrecht University (UU; nl, Universiteit Utrecht, formerly ''Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht'') is a public research university in Utrecht, Netherlands. Established , it is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands. In 2018, it had an enrollm ...

.Curriculum vitae
retrieved 2011-03-27.

Education and career

Van Leeuwen completed his undergraduate studies in mathematics at

in 1967 and received a PhD in mathematics in 1972 from the same institution under the supervision of

Dirk van Dalen Dirk van Dalen (born 20 December 1932, Amsterdam) is a Dutch mathematician and historian of science. Van Dalen studied mathematics and physics and astronomy at the University of Amsterdam. Inspired by the work of Brouwer and Heyting, he receive ...

.. After postdoctoral studies at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

and faculty positions at SUNY at Buffalo and the

Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a public state-related land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsylvania. Founded in 1855 as the Farmers' High School of Pennsylvania, Penn State becam ...

, he returned to Utrecht as a faculty member in 1977. He was head of his department from 1977 to 1983, and again from 1991 to 1994, and dean from 1994 to 2009. Jan van Leeuwen was one of the founders of Informatics Europe.

Research

Jan van Leeuwen contributed to many fields of theoretical computer science, notably to algorithm design and computational complexity theory, and to the philosophy of computing. Among his doctoral students are algorithms researcher and Utrecht faculty member Hans Bodlaender and notable game software developer and former fellow Utrecht faculty member,

Mark Overmars Markus Hendrik Overmars (; born 29 September 1958 in Zeist, Netherlands) is a Dutch computer scientist and teacher of game programming known for his game development application GameMaker. GameMaker lets people create computer games using a dra ...

. Van Leeuwen is well known as a former series editor of the

Lecture Notes in Computer Science ''Lecture Notes in Computer Science'' is a series of computer science books published by Springer Science+Business Media since 1973. Overview The series contains proceedings, post- proceedings, monographs, and Festschrift In academia, a ''F ...

Awards and honors

Van Leeuwen is a member of the Royal Dutch Society of Sciences and Humanities since 1992, and in 2006 he was elected to the

Academia Europaea The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of Humanities, Letters, Law, and Sciences. The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europea ...

. In 2008 he received an honorary doctorate from the

RWTH Aachen RWTH Aachen University (), also known as North Rhine-Westphalia Technical University of Aachen, Rhine-Westphalia Technical University of Aachen, Technical University of Aachen, University of Aachen, or ''Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hoch ...

. In 2013 he received the ACM Distinguished Service Award, together with Gerhard Goos and Juris Hartmanis.

Books

Jan van Leeuwen was the editor of the 2-volume Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science. In 2013, he and S. Barry Cooper published Alan Turing: His Work and Impact (

Elsevier Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as '' The Lancet'', '' Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', ...

, ), a special edition of the collected works of

Alan Turing Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical c ...

. This book won the R.R. Hawkins Award 2013.

Family

His son, Erik Jan van Leeuwen, is also an academic computer scientist. He was a senior researcher at the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, and currently is an assistant professor and research scientist in the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at

.Erik Jan van Leeuwen's home page
retrieved 2018-02-21.

References

External links

Home page
* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Leeuwen, Jan 1946 births Living people Dutch computer scientists Theoretical computer scientists Researchers in geometric algorithms Utrecht University alumni University at Buffalo faculty Pennsylvania State University faculty Academic staff of Utrecht University Members of Academia Europaea Officers of the Order of Orange-Nassau People from Waddinxveen 20th-century Dutch mathematicians 21st-century Dutch mathematicians