Jan van Leeuwen

Who is Jan van Leeuwen?

Jan van Leeuwen is a Dutch computer scientist and a professor at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at the Utrecht University.

Van Leeuwen completed his undergraduate studies in mathematics at Utrecht University in 1967 and received a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1971 from the same institution under the supervision of Dirk van Dalen. After postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley and faculty positions at Stony Brook University and 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. Among his doctoral students is fellow Utrecht faculty member and notable game software developer, Mark Overmars.

Van Leeuwen is an ISI highly cited researcher. Since 1992 he has been a member of the Royal Dutch Society of Science, and in 2006 he was elected to the Academia Europaea. He was the editor of the Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science.

His son, Erik Jan van Leeuwen, is also an academic computer scientist, currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science.