Biography:Maarten van Emden
Maarten van Emden | |
|---|---|
 Van Emden in Victoria, British Columbia, in 2008 | |
| Born | Maarten Herman van Emden December 31, 1937 Velp, Netherlands |
| Died | January 4, 2023 (aged 85) Victoria, British Columbia, Canada |
| Citizenship |
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| Alma mater | University of Amsterdam |
| Known for | Logic programming Prolog Artificial intelligence |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science Logic |
| Institutions | University of Victoria University of Waterloo |
| Thesis | An analysis of complexity (1971) |
| Doctoral advisor | Adriaan van Wijngaarden |
Maarten Herman van Emden (December 31, 1937 – January 4, 2023) was a Dutch-Canadian mathematician and computer scientist whose research in the foundations of logic programming and constraint logic programming was highly influential.
Early years
Van Emden was born in Velp, the Netherlands, and his early childhood was spent mostly in the Dutch East Indies.[1] He served his national military service in 1959–1960, both as pilot and commissioned officer. He attended national flight training school and worked for KLM as a pilot from 1960 to 1963.[2]
Education
Van Emden completed an MSc from the Delft University of Technology in 1966 and a PhD in computer science from the University of Amsterdam in 1971. His dissertation, “An Analysis of Complexity", was on information theory and data analysis. His thesis supervisor was Adriaan van Wijngaarden, who also supervised another notable Dutch computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra.[3]
Career
In collaboration with Robert Kowalski, Van Emden developed the fixpoint semantics of Horn clauses, which underpin the logical semantics of logic programming.[4] He further researched on software verification and correctness, and constraint satisfaction, along with interval arithmetic and interval propagation .[5] He wrote an advice-taking Prolog program for certain chess endgames.[6]
Between 2008-2019 Van Emden wrote a collection of essays on the practice of programming and the history and philosophy of computing on a blog entitled A Programmer's Place.[7]
References
- ↑ "In Memoriam: Maarten van Emden – Association for Logic Programming" (in en-US). 2023-01-30. https://logicprogramming.org/2023/01/in-memoriam-maarten-van-emden/.
- ↑ "Maarten Van Emden obituary (December 31, 1937 – January 04, 2023) – Victoria, BC – the Times Colonist". https://www.legacy.com/ca/obituaries/timescolonist/name/maarten-van-emden-obituary?pid=203621344.
- ↑ "Maarten van Emden - Chessprogramming wiki". https://www.chessprogramming.org/Maarten_van_Emden.
- ↑ van Emden, M. and Kowalski, R., "The Semantics of Predicate Logic as a Programming Language", in Journal of the ACM, Vol. 23, No. 4, 1976, pp. 733–742.
- ↑ Hickey, T.; Ju, Q.; van Emden, M.H. (2001). "Interval arithmetic: From principles to implementation". Journal of the ACM 48 (5): 1038–1068. doi:10.1145/502102.502106.
- ↑ Maarten van Emden (1982). Chess End-game Advice: a Case Study in Computer Utilisation of Knowledge. Machine Intelligence 10
- ↑ https://vanemden.wordpress.com/
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