Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Biography

Andrew S. Tanenbaum has dedicated over three decades of his life to the task of educating generations of students in the field of computer science. Dr. Tanenbaum is best known as the creator of the open source Unix-like operating system called MINIX, which he created for use alongside his textbooks, and which was eventually used by Finnish university student Linus Torvalds to create the kernel, or central component, for the Linux operating system. Dr. Tanenbaum has also penned five textbooks, which collectively have been revised through 17 editions, and have been translated into over 20 languages. Those textbooks are considered standards in the field of computer science.

Though Dr. Tanenbaum moved to the Netherlands early in his career, he retained his American citizenship, and has maintained a key interest in American political affairs. He is well known for his endeavors on the World Wide Web, where under the pseudonym, The Votemaster, Dr. Tanenbaum created the popular Web site electoral-vote.com in 2004. One of the most widely used and cited Web sites during the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, it was drawing 700,000 visitors a day; electoral-vote.com remains popular today.

An IEEE Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards, Tanenbaum is also a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received his bachelor’s in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, and his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. He currently serves as a professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, and was formerly the scientific director of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging (ASCI) for 12 years.