Genealogica Grafica: a word about the author

He was born in 1946 at Amsterdam. Studied physics, got his PhD in solid state physics, and then switched to aerodynamics research. Around 1980 he left the academic world and joined an international software consultancy company where he stayed until 1996, having held various senior management positions. In 1996, together with three colleagues, he started his own IT management company. That company, Qolor bv,  has grown to 20 staff. Tom is slowly reducing his involvement in its management, creating time to do other (hobby-type) things.

Tom's hobby drive is to create things, in particular things with a mathematical twist. Very often resulting in a program that can demonstrate the results or be used by others.

Key elements, next to mathematics, are 'presentation', 'simplicity', 'didactics'. If you have a problem in presenting your ideas or results in such a way that others can easily grab the essence, then you have a problem that Tom would like to tackle. But he will bend it towards the mathematical/programming side in order to get most kicks out of it.

Past areas of interest have resulted in:

• a complete suite of educational software for mathematics teaching in Holland ('Getal en Ruimte'). It is used by 50% of Dutch highschools.
• a very flexible and user-friendly tool for the scheduling of nursing personnel in Dutch care services; but by lack of personal drive to market it, it is not used.
• a road-map of Dutch words, for use when doing cryptogram crosswords. Via built-in dictionary synonym tables it will find all the links between two words and map them out graphically.
• analysis of the best game strategy for some dice games, blackjack, etc.
• a didactic tool for the training of Dutch conjugations (d's and t's ...): www.genealogicagrafica.nl/spelling
• a telephone directory services system to prove that full phonetic name, address and number retrieval services are possible on PC based systems for up to 10 million entries.
• a program for the retrieval and presentation of obstetric data for the Netherlands.