| Andries Brouwer | |
|---|---|
| Citizenship | Netherlands |
| Fields | Mathematician |
| Institutions | CWI, TU/e |
| Alma mater | Vrije Universiteit |
| Doctoral advisor | Maarten Maurice, Pieter Baayen |
| Known for | Graph theory, Hack |
Andries Evert Brouwer is a Dutch mathematician and computer programmer, a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His varied research interests include several branches of discrete mathematics, particularly graph theory and coding theory. Brouwer is known as the creator of the greatly expanded 1984–5 versions of the roguelike computer game Hack that formed the basis for NetHack. He is also a Linux kernel hacker.
Brouwer received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1976 from Vrije Universiteit under the supervision of Maarten Maurice and Pieter Baayen, both of whom were in turn students of Johannes De Groot.[1] He has published dozens of papers in graph theory and other areas of combinatorics, many of them in collaboration with other researchers. His co-authors include at least 9 of the co-authors of Paul Erdős, giving him an Erdős number of 2.[2]
In December 1984, while at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), he made the first public release of Hack on Usenet. Hack was an implementation of Rogue originally written in 1982 by Jay Fenlason and a few others, but Brouwer heavily modified and expanded it. He distributed a total of four versions of Hack between December 1984 and July 1985. The source code was released as free software, and it was widely copied, played, and ported to multiple computer platforms. When Mike Stephenson brought together a large development team via Usenet to produce an enhanced version in 1987 incorporating changes from many of the Hack derivatives, they respected Brouwer's wishes by renaming their game NetHack, as Brouwer might "...eventually release a new version of his own."[3]
Brouwer has also been involved with the development of Unix-like computer operating systems based on the Linux kernel. He was previously the maintainer of the man pager program man,[4] and he is a kernel maintainer in the areas of disk geometry and partition handling.[5] Brouwer also serves as specialist in security aspects of Unix and Linux for EiPSI (Eindhoven Institute for the Protection of Systems and Information), TU/e's information security research institute.[6]