Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn

Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn
Born	(1918-07-09)9 July 1918 The Hague
Died	17 February 2012(2012-02-17) (aged 93) Nuenen
Nationality	Dutch
Alma mater	Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Known for	De Bruijn sequence De Bruijn index Automath
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	Eindhoven University of Technology
Doctoral advisor	Jurjen Ferdinand Koksma
Doctoral students	Matheus Hautus Antonius Levelt Robert Nederpelt Lazarom Johannes Runnenburg Stan Ackermans

Nicolaas Govert (Dick) de Bruijn (Dutch pronunciation: [nikoːˈlaːs ˈxoːvərt də ˈbrœy̯n]; 9 July 1918 – 17 February 2012) was a Dutch mathematician and Emeritus Professor of mathematics at the Eindhoven University of Technology, noted for his many contributions in the fields of analysis, number theory, combinatorics and logic.

Biography

Born in The Hague, De Bruijn received his MA in Mathematics at the Leiden University in 1941. He received his PhD in 1943 from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam with a thesis entitled "Over modulaire vormen van meer veranderlijken" advised by Jurjen Ferdinand Koksma.

De Bruijn started his academic career as at the University of Amsterdam, where he was Professor of Mathematics from 1952 to 1960. In 1960 he moved to the Technical University Eindhoven where he was Professor of Mathematics until his retirement in 1984. Among his graduate students were Johannes Runnenburg (1960), Antonius Levelt (1961), S. Ackermans (1964), Jozef Beenakker (1966), W. van der Meiden (1967), Matheus Hautus (1970), Robert Nederpelt Lazarom (1973), Lambert van Benthem Jutting (1977), A. Janssen (1979), Diederik van Daalen (1980), and Harmannus Balsters (1986).

In 1957 he was appointed member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was Knighted with the Order of the Netherlands Lion.

Work

De Bruijn covered many areas of mathematics. He is especially noted for:

• the discovery of the De Bruijn sequence,
• discovering an algebraic theory of the Penrose tiling and, more generally, discovering the "projection" and "multigrid" methods for constructing quasi-periodic tilings,
• the De Bruijn–Newman constant, the De Bruijn–Erdős theorem in both incidence geometry,
• graph theory,
• the BEST theorem, and
• De Bruijn indices.

He wrote one of the standard books in advanced asymptotic analysis (De Bruijn, 1958).

In the late sixties, he designed the Automath language for representing mathematical proofs, so that they could be verified automatically (see automated theorem checking). Shortly before his death, he had been working on models for the human brain.

Publications

Books, a selection:

• 1943. Over modulaire vormen van meer veranderlijken
• 1958. Asymptotic Methods in Analysis, North-Holland, Amsterdam.

Articles, a selection:

• de Bruijn, Nicolaas Govert. "A combinatorial problem", 1946. In Proceedings of the Section of Sciences, Vol. 49, No. 7, pp. 758–764. Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie v. Wetenschappen.
• de Bruijn, Nicolaas Govert. "The mathematical language AUTOMATH, its usage, and some of its extensions." Symposium on automatic demonstration. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 1970.
• de Bruijn, Nicolaas Govert. "Lambda calculus notation with nameless dummies, a tool for automatic formula manipulation, with application to the Church-Rosser theorem." Indagationes Mathematicae (Proceedings). Vol. 75. No. 5. North-Holland, 1972.

External links

• Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn's obituary
• Bruijn N.G. de at win.tue.nl (in Dutch)