Andrew Tanenbaum

Andrew Stuart "Andy" Tanenbaum (sometimes referred to by the handle ast)^[6] (born March 16, 1944) is an American computer scientist and professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam in theNetherlands.^{[7][8][9][10]}

He is best known as the author of MINIX, a free Unix-like operating system for teaching purposes, and for his computer science textbooks, regarded as standard texts in the field. He regards his teaching job as his most important work.^[11] Since 2004 he has operated Electoral-vote.com, a website dedicated to analysis of polling data in federal elections in the United States.

He was born in New York City and grew up in suburban White Plains, New York.

He received his bachelor of Science degree in Physics from MIT in 1965 and his Ph.D. degree in physics from theUniversity of California, Berkeley in 1971. Tanenbaum also served as a lobbyist for the Sierra Club.^[12]

He moved to the Netherlands to live with his wife, who is Dutch, but he retains his United States citizenship. He teaches courses about Computer Organization and Operating Systems and supervises the work of Ph.D. candidates at the VU University Amsterdam.

He is well recognized for his textbooks on computer science:

• Computer Networks, co-authored with David J. Wetherall ^[13]
• Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, co-authored with Albert Woodhull,^[14]
• Modern Operating Systems,^[3]
• Distributed Operating Systems, ^[4]
• Structured Computer Organization, ^[15]
• Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, co-authored with Maarten van Steen,^[2]

Operating Systems: Design and Implementation and MINIX^[16] were Linus Torvalds' inspiration for the Linux kernel. In his autobiography Just for Fun, Torvalds describes it as "the book that launched me to new heights".

His books have been translated into many languages including Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Macedonian, Mexican Spanish, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish.^[17] They have appeared in over 120 editions and are used at universities around the world.^[18]

In the early 1990s, the Dutch government began setting up a number of thematically oriented research schools that spanned multiple universities. These schools were intended to bring professors and Ph.D. students from different Dutch (and later, foreign) universities together to help them cooperate and enhance their research.

Tanenbaum was one of the cofounders and first Dean of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging (ASCI). This school initially consisted of nearly 200 faculty members and Ph.D. students from the Vrije Universiteit, University of Amsterdam, Delft University of Technology, and Leiden University working in the areas of advanced computer systems, especially parallel computing, and image analysis and processing.

Tanenbaum remained Dean for 12 years, until 2005, when he was awarded an Academy Professorship by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, at which time he became a full-time research professor. ASCI has since grown to include researchers from nearly a dozen universities in The Netherlands, Belgium, and France. ASCI offers Ph.D. level courses, has an annual conference, and runs various workshops every year.