Henk Tijms (
Beverwijk
Beverwijk () is a municipality and a city in the Netherlands, in the province of North Holland. The town is located about northwest of Amsterdam in the Randstad metropolitan area, north of the North Sea Canal very close to the North Sea coast. A ...
, April 23, 1944) is a Dutch
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems.
Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change.
History
On ...
and Emeritus Professor of Operations Research at the
VU University Amsterdam
The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (abbreviated as ''VU Amsterdam'' or simply ''VU'' when in context) is a public research university in Amsterdam, Netherlands, being founded in 1880. The VU Amsterdam is one of two large, publicly funded research ...
.
He studied
mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
in
Amsterdam
Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the Capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population ...
where he graduated from the
University of Amsterdam
The University of Amsterdam (abbreviated as UvA, nl, Universiteit van Amsterdam) is a public research university located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The UvA is one of two large, publicly funded research universities in the city, the other being ...
in 1972 under supervision of
Gijsbert de Leve
Gijsbert (Gijs) de Leve (15 August 1926 – 19 November 2009) was a Dutch mathematician and operations researcher, known for his work on Markov decision process. Gijs de Leve is considered the founder of operations research in the Netherlands.
B ...
.
Tijms is the author of several articles on applied mathematics and
stochastics
Stochastic (, ) refers to the property of being well described by a random probability distribution. Although stochasticity and randomness are distinct in that the former refers to a modeling approach and the latter refers to phenomena themselve ...
and books on
probability
Probability is the branch of mathematics concerning numerical descriptions of how likely an Event (probability theory), event is to occur, or how likely it is that a proposition is true. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and ...
. His best-known books are ''Stochastic Modeling and Analysis'' (Wiley, 1986) and ''Understanding Probability'' (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
On October 12, 2008, Tijms became the first non-American to receive the
INFORMS Expository Writing Award.
The award honoured his achievements in the field of mathematics.
References
Living people
1944 births
University of Amsterdam faculty
Dutch mathematicians
People from Beverwijk
Dutch operations researchers
{{Netherlands-bio-stub