Jan van Leeuwen

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

Education and career 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. 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. 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

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, ), a special edition of the collected works of Alan Turing. 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, and currently is an associate professor in the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University.