Maarten van Emden

Van Emden in Victoria, British Columbia, in 2008

Born|

Maarten Herman van Emden

(1937-12-31)December 31, 1937

Velp, Netherlands

Died| January 4, 2023(2023-01-04) (aged 85)

Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Citizenship|

* Netherlands
* Canada

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.

## Contents

* 1 Early years
* 2 Education
* 3 Career
* 4 References

## 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

1. ↑ "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/.
2. ↑ "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.
3. ↑ "Maarten van Emden - Chessprogramming wiki". https://www.chessprogramming.org/Maarten_van_Emden.
4. ↑ 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.
5. ↑ 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.
6. ↑ Maarten van Emden (1982). Chess End-game Advice: a Case Study in Computer Utilisation of Knowledge. Machine Intelligence 10
7. ↑ https://vanemden.wordpress.com/

0.00

(0 votes)

Original source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maarten van Emden. Read more

|

Retrieved from "https://handwiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=Biography:Maarten_van_Emden&oldid=4224787"