Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica

Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica
Established	1946
Type	National research institute
President	Prof.dr. J. K. Lenstra
Admin. staff	~200
Location	Amsterdam, Netherlands
Website	www.cwi.nl

The Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (abbr. CWI; English: National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science) is one of the leading European research centers in the field of mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is located at the Science Park Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Early history

The institute was founded in 1946 by Johannes van der Corput, David van Dantzig, Jurjen Koksma, Hendrik Anthony Kramers, Marcel Minnaert and Jan Arnoldus Schouten. It was originally called Mathematical Centre (in Dutch: Mathematisch Centrum). One of the early missions of CWI was to develop mathematical prediction models to assist large Dutch engineering projects, such as the well-known Delta Works. During this early period, the Mathematics Institute also helped with designing the wings of the Fokker F27 Friendship airplane, voted in 2006 as the most beautiful Dutch design of the 20th century.

The computer science component developed soon after. Adriaan van Wijngaarden, considered the founder of computer science (or informatica) in the Netherlands, was the director of the institute for almost 20 years. Edsger Dijkstra did most of his early influential work on algorithms and formal methods at CWI. In 1983, the name of the institute was changed to CWI to reflect the strong computer science component in its research.

Recent research highlights

Today, the institute is internationally known for its work in fields such as operations research (in which CWI has a long tradition), software engineering, information processing, and mathematical applications in life sciences and logistics. More recent examples of research results from CWI include the development of scheduling algorithms for the Dutch railway system, the Nederlandse Spoorwegen (one of the busiest rail networks in the world), or the development of the Python programming language by Guido van Rossum. Python has played an important role in the development of Google search platform from the beginning, and it continues to do so as the system grows and evolves.^[1] Also, many of the information retrieval solutions used by packages such as SPSS were initially developed by Data Distilleries, a spinoff of CWI.

Work at the institute is regularly recognized by national or international research awards, such as the Lanchester Prize prize (awarded yearly by INFORMS), the Gödel Prize (awarded by ACM SIGACT) or the Spinoza prize. Most of its senior researchers hold part-time professorships at other Dutch universities, with the institute producing over 170 full professors during the course of its history. Several CWI researchers have been recognized as members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academia Europaea, or as knights in the Order of the Netherlands Lion.

CWI is a founding member of European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM), the European network of national computer science research institutes.

Birthplace of the European Internet

CWI is one of the "birthplaces" of the Internet in Europe. The first connection in Europe to the NSFnet network, which later developed into the current Internet, was established at CWI on 17 November 1988 by Piet Beertema. Cwi.nl was also the first national domain name ever issued anywhere.

Even today, the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (the largest Internet Exchange in the world, in terms of both members and throughput traffic) is located at the neighbouring SARA (an early CWI spin-off) and NIKHEF institutes. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) office for the Benelux countries is located at CWI.

Software and languages developed at or with CWI

• ABC programming language
• Algol 68
• Alma-0, a multi-paradigm computer programming language
• Python programming language
• SMIL
• MonetDB

Notable people

• Hugo Brandt Corstius
• Andries Brouwer
• Edsger Dijkstra
• Richard D. Gill
• Dick Grune
• Kees Koster
• Barry Mailloux
• Lambert Meertens
• Steven Pemberton
• Guido van Rossum
• Alexander Schrijver
• Adriaan van Wijngaarden

External links

• CWI website

References

1. ^ http://python.org/about/quotes/

Coordinates: 52°21′23″N 4°57′07″E / 52.35639°N 4.95194°E / 52.35639; 4.95194