Markus Hendrik "Mark" Overmars (; born 29 September 1958) is a Dutch

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

and teacher of game programming known for his game development application GameMaker. GameMaker allows users to 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; , formerly ''Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht'') is a public university, public research university in Utrecht, Netherlands. Established , it is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands. In 2023, it had an enrollment of ...

in the

Netherlands , Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...

. This research center focuses on computational geometry and its applications in areas such as

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

robotics Robotics is the interdisciplinary study and practice of the design, construction, operation, and use of robots. Within mechanical engineering, robotics is the design and construction of the physical structures of robots, while in computer s ...

geographic information system A geographic information system (GIS) consists of integrated computer hardware and Geographic information system software, software that store, manage, Spatial analysis, analyze, edit, output, and Cartographic design, visualize Geographic data ...

s, imaging,

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, virtual environments, and games. Overmars received his Ph.D. in 1983 from Utrecht University under the supervision of Jan van Leeuwen, and remained a faculty member at the same university until September 2013. Overmars has published over 100 journal papers, largely on computational geometry, and is a co-author of several widely used textbooks on the subject. Overmars has also worked in robotics. He was the first to develop the probabilistic roadmap method 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 Motion planning, also path planning (also known as the navigation problem or the piano mover's problem) is a computational problem to find a sequence of valid configurations that moves the object from the source to destination. The term is used ...

, and has been widely cited (more than 2,500 times as of 2014, according to

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). In 2011, Overmars and game designer Jochem Schut developed a snake video game called ''Super Snake HD'' as a mobile app, which was published by

YoYo Games YoYo Games is a Scottish software development company based in Dundee, Scotland. From February 2015 to January 2021, the company was owned by Playtech; afterwards, it was sold to Opera (company), Opera to launch its new gaming division. Histor ...

.App stores for Super Snake HD'': * * * Overmars founded and served as the CTO of Tingly Games from 2012 until its acquisition by CoolGames in 2016. Tingly focused on HTML5 games and e-cards/casual games, the latter of which are also known as "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 Academic staff of Utrecht University Dutch software engineers