Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn

Nicolaas Govert De Bruijn

Nicolaas Govert "Dick" de Bruijn (9 July 1918 – 17 February 2012) was 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 discovery 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 checking). Shortly before his death, he had been working on models for the human brain.