Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S., M.D., M.D.S. is a fictional character in a series of detective short stories and two novels by Jacques Futrelle. Some of the short stories were originally published in The Saturday Evening Post and the Boston American.
In the stories Professor Van Dusen solves a variety of different mysteries together with his friend Hutchinson Hatch, reporter of a fictional newspaper called "The Daily New Yorker". The professor is known as the "Thinking Machine", solving problems by the remorseless application of logic.
Futrelle, then age 37, died on April 15, 1912 when, as a passenger on the RMS Titanic, he refused to board a lifeboat, insisting his wife board instead.
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The professor appeared in two episodes of the 1970s Thames Television series The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes. Douglas Wilmer portrayed Van Dusen in "Cell 13" and "The Superfluous Finger."
Between 1978 and 1999 the German radio station RIAS produced and broadcasted 79 Augustus Van Dusen-based radio plays. A few of them were based on original stories by Futrelle, but most of the scripts were new creations by German author Michael Koser. The role of Hutchinson Hatch is a lot more prominent in the radio plays than it was in the original; Hatch was made into the fictional narrator in the radio version.
In 2011, the BBC Radio 4 series The Rivals featured Paul Rhys as Professor Van Dusen in Chris Harrald's adaptation of "The Problem of Cell 13", which was directed by Sasha Yevtushenko.