Name: Krzysztof R. Apt
Title: Professor
Company: Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI)
and University of Amsterdam
Contact Info: k.r.apt@cwi.nl
Webpage: http://www.cwi.nl/~apt
How I arrived at my present job (academic and other influences): I got my PhD in mathematical logic from the University of Warsaw in Poland in 1974. Soon after, I left Poland and moved one year later to computer science. In those days it was much easier to shift from mathematics to computer science. I have been working at CWI since 1987 and at the University of Amsterdam since 1990.
How I organize my day: 1 day a week I work at home. I try then to limit it to research (though often referee reports stand in the way ...). The rest of the week I spend at my office, usually from 9:15 till 17:30, or so. In the evening at home I often clean up my emails.
Having said that I should add that I am an evening person, so I usually get good ideas in the evening and work them out during the day.
Amount of time spent working daily (at home and office): 8-9 hours
What I do to get myself thinking creatively: Attending lectures of brilliant researchers, attending conferences and workshops in my field. Reading biographies of famous people.
Also I get very much inspired by hearing about unknown people who got famous out of nowhere. Colin Wilson wrote his first book, a phenomenal bestseller, "The Outsider" as a 24 years old fellow, in British Museum. More recently, J. Rowlings, the author of the Harry Potter books started writing as a single mother living on a welfare.
My problem-solving strategy: I more value work that leads to simple results and, preferably, good definitions. I am a rather slow thinker so first try to understand what is the problem and then fantasize how a solution might look under the best circumstances. Afterwards a hard work begins that sometimes may take up to two years for one paper meant for a journal. Also, I find that writing well is important so spend a lot of time at polishing the articles (long after some co-authors lost interest ...).
What I do to relieve stress: Cycling to and from work (25 min each way), spending time with family, reading books (recently history). Never computer on Sundays and rarely on Saturdays.
My hero, mentor, or person I most admire and why: My advisors in mathematical logic in Poland, Grzegorczyk, Ryll-Nardzewski, and Mostowski were brilliant and extremely honest researchers. They instilled in me a sense of respect for science that I still have in me (in spite of seeing what a commercial enterprise it became).
In computer science I have been inspired by the works of Dijkstra, Hoare and Wirth. I value Dijkstra for his unsurpassed sense of elegance and strife for perfection and simplicity, Hoare for coming up with original concepts and ideas, and Wirth for designing and implementing Pascal.
I also value Dijkstra for his scientific integrity. He would never think of adding his name to a paper he did not contribute to. In fact, he wrote most of his papers alone.
One event or decision in my life I wish I could go back and change: During my mathematics studies in Wroclaw, Poland, (1967-1972) I should have taken some courses in computer science. They had then a running local implementation of Algol-60. But I did not do this and in the end I ran my first program only in 1975, while being already employed as a researcher in computer science. It was then too late to change my thinking habits and to incorporate in a meaningful way practical computer science into my research.
What values are the most important to me and what I value in others: Integrity, optimism, curiosity, being reliable, courage, original opinions - nowadays so many people just repeat what they heard from other sources.
What inspires, motivates, or gets me excited about my job on a daily basis: Computer science is a bit like the mind-body problem, with software being the mind and hardware being the body. What fascinates me about computer science is that we can shift this borderline and determine ourselves what are its main ingredients.
Why did we end up with the currenly dominating programming languages? Why did the computer mouse, the pull-down menu's and windows become so successful? Such questions have nothing to do with my research but they inspire me to think at a higher level.
Biography:
In my research I am interested in uses of mathematical logic
for programming and for reasoning. In the past ten years I worked
on program verification, logic programming and more recently on
constraint programming. This resulted in two books.
Also, I like to organize things. Not as a manager who just tells others what to do, but as a solitary organizer who does most of the things himself starting from scratch. Recently I combined this passion for organizing with computer science by founding a new journal, The ACM Transactions on Computational Logic and by running it as the Editor-in-Chief.
My goals? I find that a properly organized scientific knowledge should be freely available through the internet. This can be done, but first we need to change our attitudes towards scientific publishing. As a first step I resigned in 1999 from editorial boards of four journals that I consider too expensive. Needless to say I don't referee anymore papers submitted to excessively expensive journals. Also, I was one of the fifty editors of the Journal of Logic Programming (JLP) who decided to leave Elsevier to found a new journal, Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP), published by the Cambridge University Press as of January 2001 at the 60% lower price per page. In May 2001 issue of Communications of the ACM there will appear my viewpoint on these matters, "One More Revolution to Make: Free Scientific Publishing (FSP)." Read it and think about it. Also you can shape our future.
Survey filled out: March 2001
Last Modified:
Location: www.acm.org/crossroads/dayinlife/bios/krzysztof_apt.html