Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica

Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam is the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science. It was founded in 1946 as Mathematisch Centrum (MC ) of Jurjen Koksma, David van Dantzig, Hendrik Anthony Kramers, Johannes van der Corput Jan Schouten and Marcel Minnaert. The MC was dedicated at that time particularly in applied mathematics and employed, for example, with extreme value statistics to determine a height of the dikes, which should avoid the catastrophic effects of a storm surge as the tsunami of 1953. 1983, the name was changed to CWI after the Dutch government wanted to promote computer science stronger.

The center is located since 2009 in the Science Park 123 East Amsterdam next to the NIKHEF ( the Dutch National Institute for Nuclear and High Energy Physics ) and the computer center SARA. Before it was in the Kruislaan 413

Currently ( 2009) there are 55 scientists on permanent contracts, with an additional approximately twice as much post-docs and PhD students. Among the scientists working there included Adriaan van Wijngaarden ( from 1947 there head of computer science ), Edsger W. Dijkstra ( 1952-1962 ), Jaco de Bakker Jan Hemelrijk and Herman te Riele. Van Wijngaarden and Dijkstra played during their time at the MC an important role in the development of ALGOL. Other well-known mathematician at CWI Alexander Schrijver ( Combinatorial Optimization, for example in the Dutch railway) and Michiel Hazewinkel.

In MC, the first publicly accessible computers were installed in the Netherlands in the 1950s. There Carel Scholten and Bram Loopstra developed ( who worked with Dijkstra ) the ARRA I ( 1952) and II computer (the latter with Gerrit Blaauw ) and later the Electro Logica X1, produced in 1958 of which was founded by the Mathematisch Centrum and the Insurance Firm Nillmij company Electro Logica were the first computer company in the Netherlands. The Python programming language was developed in the early 1990s by Guido van Rossum at the Mathematisch Centrum. In the early days of the Internet, e -mail traffic between Europe and the U.S. on the VAX computer of the MC ran under the leadership of Piet Beertema and cwi.nl was the first ever awarded national domain name.

The research fields of the CWI are interdisciplinary aligned with four main departments: Modeling, Analysis and Simulation ( MAS), Probability, Networks and Algorithms (PNA ), Information Systems (INS ), Software Engineering ( SEN). In 2007, about two-thirds of the budget of 2006 amounted to approximately 16 million euros from the Dutch government research organization (NWO ).

Directors of the CWI were, among others 1980-1994 Pieter Cornelis Baayen and 2003-2011 Karel Lenstra January.