Education
He studied mathematics at Utrecht University from 1959 to 1965 and obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree there in 1968 under the supervision of Hans Freudenthal. He supervised 24 Doctor of Philosophy students.
player mathematician university professor
He studied mathematics at Utrecht University from 1959 to 1965 and obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree there in 1968 under the supervision of Hans Freudenthal. He supervised 24 Doctor of Philosophy students.
After a postdoctoral year 1969-1970 in Lund, where he learned Fourier integral operators from Lars Hörmander, he went in 1971-1974 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. 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.
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.