Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn

Nicolaas Govert (Dick) de Bruijn (born 9 July 1918) is a Dutch mathematician, affiliated as professor emeritus with the Eindhoven University of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in 1943 from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

De Bruijn covered many areas of mathematics. He is especially noted for the invention of the De Bruijn sequence. He is also partly responsible for the De Bruijn-Newman constant, the De Bruijn–Erdős theorem (in both incidence geometry and graph theory) and the BEST theorem. He wrote one of the standard books in advanced asymptotic analysis (De Bruijn, 1958). De Bruijn also worked on the theory of Penrose tilings. In the late sixties, he designed the Automath language for representing mathematical proofs, so that they could be verified automatically (see automated theorem proving). Lately, he has been working on models for the human brain.

Publications

• de Bruijn, Asymptotic Methods in Analysis, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1958.

See also

• De Bruijn graph
• De Bruijn index
• De Bruijn notation
• De Bruijn tiling
• De Bruijn's theorem
• Dickman–De Bruijn function
• Eulerian path

External links

• Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Curriculum vitae (abridged)
• "De Bruijn-Erdős theorem". PlanetMath.