Markus Hendrik Overmars (; born 29 September 1958 in

Zeist Zeist () is the capital and largest town of the municipality of Zeist. The town is located in the Utrecht province of the Netherlands, east of the city of Utrecht. History The town of "Seist" was first mentioned in a charter in the year 8 ...

Netherlands ) , anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau") , image_map = , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands , established_title = Before independence , established_date = Spanish Netherl ...

) 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 (a ...

and teacher of game programming known for his game development application

GameMaker GameMaker (originally Animo, Game Maker ''(until 2011)'' and GameMaker Studio) is a series of cross-platform game engines created by Mark Overmars in 1999 and developed by YoYo Games since 2007. The latest iteration of ''GameMaker'' released ...

. GameMaker lets people create computer games using a drag-and-drop interface. He is the former head of the ''Center for Geometry, Imaging, and Virtual Environments'' 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 enrollme ...

, in the

. This research center concentrates on

computational geometry Computational geometry is a branch of computer science devoted to the study of algorithms which can be stated in terms of geometry. Some purely geometrical problems arise out of the study of computational geometric algorithms, and such problems ar ...

and its application in areas like

computer graphics Computer graphics deals with generating images with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great de ...

robotics Robotics is an interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist humans. Robotics integrat ...

geographic information system A geographic information system (GIS) is a type of database containing geographic data (that is, descriptions of phenomena for which location is relevant), combined with software tools for managing, analyzing, and visualizing those data. In a ...

s, imaging,

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradit ...

, virtual environments, and games. Overmars received his Ph.D. in 1983 from Utrecht University under the supervision of

Jan van Leeuwen Jan van Leeuwen (born December 17, 1946, in Waddinxveen) is a Dutch computer scientist and Emeritus professor of computer science at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University.

, and continued to be a member of the faculty of the same university until September 2013. Overmars has published over 100 journal papers, largely on

, and is the co-author of several books including a widely used computational geometry text. Overmars has also worked in robotics. He was the first to develop the

probabilistic roadmap method The probabilistic roadmap planner is a motion planning algorithm in robotics, which solves the problem of determining a path between a starting configuration of the robot and a goal configuration while avoiding collisions. The basic idea behind ...

in 1992, which was later independently discovered by Kavraki and Latombe in 1994. Their joint paper, ''Probabilistic roadmaps for path planning in high-dimensional configuration spaces'', is considered one of the most influential studies in motion planning, and has been widely cited (more than 2500 times as of 2014 according to

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes ...

). In 2011, Overmars and game designer Jochem Schut developed a snake video game called ''Super Snake HD'' as a mobile app; it was published by YoYo Games.App stores for Super Snake HD'': * * * Overmars founded and was CTO of Tingly Games from 2012 until it was acquired by CoolGames in 2016. Tingly focused on HTML5 games and e-cards / casual games, the latter of which is called "greeting games". He founded Quarterfall in June 2020 together with Arjan Egges. Quarterfall is a teaching product that helps teachers use formative assessment to improve the learning processes their students, compared to just assessing their performance. He is also the original author of the XForms toolkit.

Books

* * 2nd ed., 2000; 3rd ed., 2008.. *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Overmars, Mark H. 1958 births Living people Researchers in geometric algorithms Dutch computer scientists Dutch computer programmers Roboticists People from Zeist Utrecht University alumni Utrecht University faculty Software engineers