Biography
Jan Bergstra was born in 1951 in Rotterdam, the son of Tjeerd Bergstra and Johanna Bisschop. He was educated at the Montessori Lyceum Rotterdam (gymnasium beta) and then studied mathematics at Utrecht University, starting in 1969. After an MSc he wrote a PhD thesis, defended in 1976, on recursion theory in higher types, under the supervision of Dirk van Dalen.
Bergstra held posts at the Institute of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Leiden (1976–82), and the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam. In 1985 he was appointed Professor of Programming and Software Engineering at the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam and, at the same time, Professor of Applied Logic at Utrecht University; such split positions are not uncommon in the Netherlands. These two chairs he continues to hold.
He has been an Advisor of the CWI (1985–2004). In 1989 he worked for a year at Philips Research in Eindhoven as a project leader and, subsequently, continued as a consultant there until 2002. While at Philips he was involved in industrial projects on consumer electronics and medical equipment.
He founded CONCUR, the international conference series in Concurrency Theory, by organising the first two conferences in Amsterdam in 1990 and 1991. He is a member of several editorial boards, and is the managing editor of Science of Computer Programming and the Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming.
He is honorary Professor of Computer Science at Swansea University and a member of Academia Europaea.
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