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Jan van Leeuwen

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Jan van Leeuwen
Born (1946-12-17) 17 December 1946 (age 77)
Waddinxveen, Netherlands
NationalityDutch
Alma materUtrecht University
Scientific career
FieldsComputer Science
InstitutionsUtrecht University
Thesis Rule-Labeled Programs: A Study of a Generalization of Context-Free Grammars and Some Classes of Formal Languages  (1972)
Doctoral advisorDirk van Dalen
Doctoral studentsCatholijn Jonker

Jan van Leeuwen (born 17 December 1946 in Waddinxveen)[1] is a Dutch computer scientist and emeritus professor of computer science at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University.[2]

Education and career

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Van Leeuwen completed his undergraduate studies in mathematics at Utrecht University in 1967 and received a PhD in mathematics in 1972 from the same institution under the supervision of Dirk van Dalen.[2][3] After postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley and faculty positions at SUNY at Buffalo and the Pennsylvania State University, 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.[2] Jan van Leeuwen was one of the founders of Informatics Europe.

Research

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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.[2] 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.[3] Van Leeuwen is well known as a former series editor of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science.[2]

Awards and honors

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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.[2][4] In 2008 he received an honorary doctorate from the RWTH Aachen. In 2013 he received the ACM Distinguished Service Award, together with Gerhard Goos and Juris Hartmanis.

Books

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Jan van Leeuwen was the editor of the two-volume Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science. In 2013, he and S. Barry Cooper published Alan Turing: His Work and Impact (Elsevier, ISBN 978-0-12-386980-7), a special edition of the collected works of Alan Turing. This book won the R.R. Hawkins Award 2013.

Family

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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 Utrecht University.[5]

References

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  1. ^ 2009 Lorentz Fellowship Archived 2011-07-21 at the Wayback Machine, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, retrieved 2011-03-27.
  2. ^ a b c d e f Curriculum vitae Archived 2011-10-02 at the Wayback Machine, retrieved 2011-03-27.
  3. ^ a b Jan van Leeuwen at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
  4. ^ Academia Europaea Informatics Section Archived 2011-07-24 at the Wayback Machine, retrieved 2011-03-27.
  5. ^ Erik Jan van Leeuwen's home page, retrieved 2018-02-21.
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