Mark Overmars

For the Dutch football (soccer) player with a similar name, see Marc Overmars.

Mark H. Overmars
Born	September 29, 1958 (1958-09-29) (age 53) Zeist, Netherlands
Residence	Utrecht, Netherlands
Nationality	Dutch
Fields	Computational geometry Robotics
Institutions	Utrecht University
Alma mater	Utrecht University
Doctoral advisor	Jan van Leeuwen
Doctoral students	Mark de Berg Marc van Kreveld
Known for	Probabilistic Roadmap Method, Game Maker

Markus Hendrik Overmars (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈmɑrk ˈɦɛnˌdrɪk ˈoːvərˌmɑrs]) (born 29 September 1958 in Zeist, Netherlands)^[1] is a Dutch computer scientist and teacher of game programming known for his game development application Game Maker. Game Maker lets people create computer games using a drag-and-drop interface. He is the head of the Center for Geometry, Imaging, and Virtual Environments at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. This research center concentrates on computational geometry and its application in areas like computer graphics, robotics, geographic information systems, imaging, multimedia, virtual environments, and games.

Overmars received his Ph.D. in 1983 from Utrecht University under the supervision of Jan van Leeuwen,^[2] and has since been a member of the faculty of the same university. Overmars has published over 100 journal papers, largely on computational geometry, and is the co-author of several books including a widely used computational geometry text. He has an Erdős number of 3, due to his collaborations with several other computational geometers.^[3]

Overmars has also worked in robotics. He was the first to develop the probabilistic roadmap method in 1992, which was later independently discovered by Kavraki and Latombe in 1994. Their joint paper, Probabilistic roadmaps for path planning in high-dimensional configuration spaces,^[4] is considered one of the most influential studies in motion planning, and has been widely cited (more than 1000 times as of 2008).

Books

• Overmars, M. H. (1983). The Design of Dynamic Data Structures. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, no. 156, Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0-387-12330-X. 
• de Berg, M.; van Kreveld, M.; Overmars, M. H.; Schwarzkopf, O. (2000). Computational Geometry, Algorithms and Applications (2nd ed.). Springer-Verlag. ISBN 3-540-65620-0. 
• Habgood, J.; Overmars, M. H. (2006). The Game Maker's Apprentice: Game Development for Beginners. APress. ISBN 1-59059-615-3. 

References

1. ^ Curriculum vitae from the Utrecht University web site.
2. ^ Markus (Mark) Hendrik Overmars at the Mathematics Genealogy Project..
3. ^ American Mathematical Society collaboration distance calculator, August 25, 2008.
4. ^ Kavraki, L.E.; Svestka, P.; Latombe, J.C.; Overmars, M.H. (1996). "Probabilistic roadmaps for path planning in high-dimensional configuration spaces". Robotics and Automation, IEEE Transactions on 12 (4): 566–580. doi:10.1109/70.508439. http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~sakella/rmp03/hw/hw4/kavraki_prm.pdf. ^{[dead link]}

External links

• Mark Overmars' homepage
• Entry at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Game Maker website

Persondata
Name	Overmars, Mark H.
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1958-09-29
Place of birth	Zeist, Netherlands
Date of death
Place of death