Mark Overmars

Who is Mark Overmars?

Markus Hendrik Overmars is a Dutch computer scientist and teacher of game programming known for his game development application Game Maker. Game Maker lets people create computer games using a drag-and-drop interface. He is the head of the Center for Geometry, Imaging, and Virtual Environments at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. This research center concentrates on computational geometry and its application in areas like computer graphics, robotics, geographic information systems, imaging, multimedia, virtual environments, and games.

Overmars received his Ph.D. in 1983 from Utrecht University under the supervision of Jan van Leeuwen, and has since been a member of the faculty of the same university. Overmars has published over 100 journal papers, largely on computational geometry, and is the co-author of several books including a widely used computational geometry text. He has an Erdős number of 3, due to his collaborations with several other computational geometers.

Overmars has also worked in robotics. He was the first to develop the probabilistic roadmap method in 1992, which was later independently discovered by Kavraki and Latombe in 1994. Their joint paper, Probabilistic roadmaps for path planning in high-dimensional configuration spaces, is considered one of the most influential studies in motion planning, and has been widely cited.