Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn (born 9 July 1918) is a Dutch

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 mathematician

Mathematician

A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....

, affiliated as professor emeritus with the Eindhoven University of Technology

Eindhoven University of Technology

The ' is a university of technology located in Eindhoven, Netherlands. The motto of the university is: Mens agitat molem . The university was the second of its kind in the Netherlands, only Delft University of Technology existed previously. Until mid-1980 it was known as the...

. He received his Ph.D.

Ph.D.

A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 in 1943 from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

De Bruijn covered many areas of mathematics. He is especially noted for the invention of the De Bruijn sequence

De Bruijn sequence

In combinatorial mathematics, a k-ary De Bruijn sequence B of order n, named after the Dutch mathematician Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn, is a cyclic sequence of a given alphabet A with size k for which every possible subsequence of length n in A appears as a sequence of consecutive characters exactly...

. He is also partly responsible for the De Bruijn–Newman constant, the De Bruijn–Erdős theorem (in both incidence geometry

De Bruijn–Erdős theorem (incidence geometry)

In incidence geometry, the De Bruijn–Erdős theorem, originally published by Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn and Paul Erdős, states a lower bound on the number of lines determined by n points in a projective plane...

 and graph theory) and the BEST theorem

BEST theorem

In graph theory, a part of discrete mathematics, the BEST theorem gives a product formula for the number of Eulerian circuits in directed graphs. The name is an acronym of the names of people who discovered it: de Bruijn, van Aardenne-Ehrenfest, Smith and Tutte.- Precise statement :Let...

. He wrote one of the standard books in advanced asymptotic analysis

Asymptotic analysis

In mathematical analysis, asymptotic analysis is a method of describing limiting behavior. The methodology has applications across science. Examples are...

 (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). Lately, he has been working on models for the human brain

Human brain

The human brain has the same general structure as the brains of other mammals, but is over three times larger than the brain of a typical mammal with an equivalent body size. Estimates for the number of neurons in the human brain range from 80 to 120 billion...

.

See also

• De Bruijn graph
  De Bruijn graph
  In graph theory, an n-dimensional De Bruijn graph of m symbols is a directed graph representing overlaps between sequences of symbols. It has mn vertices, consisting of all possible length-n sequences of the given symbols; the same symbol may appear multiple times in a sequence...
  
  
• De Bruijn index
  De Bruijn index
  In mathematical logic, the De Bruijn index is a notation invented by the Dutch mathematician Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn for representing terms in the λ calculus with the purpose of eliminating the names of the variable from the notation. Terms written using these indexes are invariant with respect...
  
  
• De Bruijn notation
  De Bruijn notation
  In mathematical logic, the De Bruijn notation is a syntax for terms in the λ calculus invented by the Dutch mathematician Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn...
  
  
• De Bruijn tiling
• De Bruijn's theorem
  De Bruijn's theorem
  De Bruijn's theorem is a theorem concerning computational geometry and packing problems attributed to Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn.-Theorem:A box can be packed with a brick a×ab×abc if and only if the box has dimensions ap×abq×abcr for some natural numbers p, q, r....
  
  
• De Bruijn–Erdős theorem
• Dickman–De Bruijn function
• Eulerian path
  Eulerian path
  In graph theory, an Eulerian trail is a trail in a graph which visits every edge exactly once. Similarly, an Eulerian circuit or Eulerian cycle is a Eulerian trail which starts and ends on the same vertex. They were first discussed by Leonhard Euler while solving the famous Seven Bridges of...
  
  

External links

• Curriculum vitae (abridged)