Jan van Leeuwen

Gerhard Goos, Juris Hartmanis, and Jan van Leeuwen are eminent researchers who by example and by leadership in various research organisations helped establish computer science as a vibrant subject. This award recognizes in particular their service and contribution to the computer science community through their high quality editorship of the Springer Lecture Notes Series in Computer Science. Goos and Hartmanis started editing this series in 1973 and were joined by van Leeuwen some years later. This congenial team soon established the series as a stable, reliable, and highly visible platform for disseminating research results and insights from all areas of the then nascent field of computer science. LNCS was a highly important and influential publication platform at a time when researchers often worked in isolation, came from diverse backgrounds, and had few genuine computer science venues to call upon. Through the LNCS series Goos, Hartmanis, and van Leeuwen provided a widely read, well visited forum that supported the exploration of new areas, enabled the dissemination of ideas, and served as an initial platform for many a young researcher. With untiring enthusiasm Goos, Hartmanis, and van Leeuwen showed exceptional taste and prescience in identifying and nurturing new fields and talent. When they passed on the baton as chief editors of the LNCS series in 2004, the volume count had reached the staggering number of 3000, yet the quality and high standards of the LNCS series during their stewardship has proven difficult to match. The long-term effect of their able and dedicated service on the development of computer science cannot be exaggerated.