Andries Brouwer

Who is Andries Brouwer?

Andries Evert Brouwer is a Dutch mathematician and computer programmer, a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology. His varied research interests include several branches of discrete mathematics, particularly graph theory and coding theory. Brouwer is known as the creator of the greatly expanded 1984–5 versions of the roguelike computer game Hack that formed the basis for NetHack. He is also a Linux kernel hacker.

Brouwer received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1976 from Vrije Universiteit under the supervision of Maarten Maurice and Pieter Baayen, both of whom were in turn students of Johannes De Groot. He has published dozens of papers in graph theory and other areas of combinatorics, many of them in collaboration with other researchers. His co-authors include at least 9 of the co-authors of Paul Erdős, giving him an Erdős number of 2.

In December 1984, while at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, he made the first public release of Hack on Usenet. Hack was an implementation of Rogue originally written in 1982 by Jay Fenlason and a few others, but Brouwer heavily modified and expanded it. He distributed a total of four versions of Hack between December 1984 and July 1985.