
Prof. dr. N.G. de Bruijn, 1918-2012 - ColinWright
http://www.science.uva.nl/math/#item1329781416
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lubutu
De Bruijn also invented De Bruijn indices for handling bound variables in
lambda calculus without having to deal with renaming. De Bruijn indices are
used to implement practically _every_ modern functional programming language.
They are also quite beautiful. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_index>

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tikhonj
I learned about why De Bruijn indices are awesome just a couple of days after
his death--very unfortunate timing. I only learned about it after I started
appreciating them...

(Basically, they are neat because they let you represent a lambda as just a
body and an environment as just a list of values, elegantly avoiding the
pitfalls of using named variables.)

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imurray
I first heard about de Bruijn sequences [1] in a talk by Persi Diaconis. Among
other things, he described the lock picking "use" listed first in the
Wikipedia article. They're such obviously cool objects, that I feel like they
should be useful in all sorts of places. Sadly I've yet to find an excuse to
use them myself though.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence>

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searine
People might be confused or bewildered by the depth of this mans research. How
does esoteric math apply to everyday life?!?!?

Well,De Bruijn Graphs are used every day to assemble short pieces of DNA into
newly sequenced genomes. They build the relationships to build the genome.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_graph>

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Jach
I got an email from him back in late October (I had previously sent an email
asking about his work in mathematical models of the brain though I didn't
really expect a reply), apparently his main computer had recently broke down
at that time and he didn't have access to everything he had stored on it. I
wonder if the data was recovered. I'm really sad and depressed he's gone.

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rcthompson
I regularly use algorithms based on de-Bruijn graphs in my work (genome and
transcriptome assembly).

