Jan van Leeuwen (born December 17, 1946, in

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

) 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 (al ...

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 enrollme ...

.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 received ...

.. 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 The State University of New York at Buffalo, commonly called the University at Buffalo (UB) and sometimes called SUNY Buffalo, is a public research university with campuses in Buffalo and Amherst, New York. The university was founded in 1846 ...

and the

Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a Public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related Land-grant university, land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsylvan ...

, 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 Informatics Europe is the European association of university departments and research laboratories, in the field of informatics (also known as computer science). Overview Founded in 2006,Bertrand Meyer and Willy Zwaenepoel, ''European Computer Sci ...

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 Hans Leo Bodlaender (born April 21, 1960) is a Dutch computer scientist, a professor of computer science at Utrecht University. Bodlaender is known for his work on graph algorithms and parameterized complexity and in particular for algorithms rela ...

and notable game software developer and former fellow Utrecht faculty member, Mark Overmars. 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 Festschrifts. In addition, tutorials, ...

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 The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

, together with Gerhard Goos and

Juris Hartmanis Juris Hartmanis (July 5, 1928 – July 29, 2022) was a Latvian-born American computer scientist and computational theorist who, with Richard E. Stearns, received the 1993 ACM Turing Award "in recognition of their seminal paper which establis ...

Books

Jan van Leeuwen was the editor of the 2-volume

Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science A handbook is a type of reference work, or other collection of instructions, that is intended to provide ready reference. The term originally applied to a small or portable book containing information useful for its owner, but the ''Oxford Engl ...

. In 2013, he and

S. Barry Cooper S. Barry Cooper (9 October 1943 – 26 October 2015) was an English mathematician and computability theory, computability theorist. He was a professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Leeds. Early life and education Cooper grew up in ...

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'', th ...

, ), 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 com ...

. 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 The Max Planck Institute for Informatics (German: ''Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik'', abbreviated ''MPI-INF'' or ''MPII'') is a research institute in computer science with a focus on algorithms and their applications in a broad sense. It hosts ...

, 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