Hans Duistermaat

Johannes Jisse (Hans) Duistermaat (The Hague, December 20, 1942 – Utrecht, March 19, 2010) was a Dutch mathematician. He studied mathematics at Utrecht University from 1959 to 1965 and obtained his PhD degree there in 1968 under the supervision of Hans Freudenthal. After a postdoctoral year 1969–70 in Lund, where he learned Fourier integral operators from Lars Hörmander, he went in 1971–74 to Nijmegen, where he became full professor in 1972. In 1974 he returned to Utrecht on the chair of professor Freudenthal, where he stayed until his unexpected death in March 2010.

He became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982, and Academy Professor in 2004. As of March 2017, he has supervised 25 PhD students.

Duistermaat worked in many different areas of mathematics: classical mechanics, symplectic geometry, Fourier integral operators, partial differential equations, algebraic geometry, harmonic analysis, and dynamical systems. Apart from roughly 50 articles in refereed international journals, he has (co-)written 11 books. Among his best known research are his article with Victor Guillemin on spectra of elliptic operators and periodic bicharacteristics, his article with Gert Heckman on the Duistermaat–Heckman formula, and his article with Alberto Grünbaum on the bispectral problem.

Apart from being an eminent mathematician, he was also a good chess player. In a simultaneous match of 10 against Anatoly Karpov in 1977, Duistermaat was the only one who did not lose.