|
Citation
For sustained contributions to computer science education, especially in the areas of graphics and user interfaces. Through his writings, programs, films, and personal enthusiasm, he has inspired generations of students at Brown University and computer users everywhere.
Full Citation
Andries van Dam is the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of Computer
Science at Brown University. Professor van Dam was a founder of that
department, and its chair for nine years. After introducing computer science to
high schools in 1962, in 1968 he helped form the standard ACM university
curriculum. He pioneered the electronic classroom, and the use of animation and
hypermedia for teaching. His former students are department chairs at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, the University of
Washington, and the University of Waterloo, as well as leaders in industry. All
five of his eligible students have National Science Foundation Presidential
Young Investigators Awards.
Professor van Dam has held thirty consultancies, authored or co-authored five
books and eighty papers and given one-hundred and fifty invited lectures. His
graphics text is the standard in the field. He is a founder of ACM SIGGRAPH.
van Dam has been an international leader in the development of undergraduate and
graduate curricula in computer graphics, his principal research area. He has
fostered innovative teaching methods at Brown not only in computer science, but
in the application of computing technology in other disciplines. His personal
investment in Brown students - particularly undergraduates - over nearly three
decades has yielded an enormous pool of people who have followed in his
footsteps as educators, researchers and developers.
Through his research interest in "computer books," van Dam has developed systems
that promote the connectivity of ideas and aid in the search for and creation of
information. He collaborated with Ted Nelson to produce an early prototype of
hypertest to explore ideas of nonsequential reading and writing. A version of
his WYSIWYG hypertext editing system was installed in the Brown library more
than twenty years ago and was used to each poetry classes in the English
Department. His Interactive Graphical Documents system was a very early
hypermedia system, combining graphics and animation with text.
van Dam produced generations of students who left Brown genuinely excited both
about computer science and about computer science education.
|
