Piet Hut
| Piet Hut | |
|---|---|
Piet Hut
|
|
| Born |
September 26, 1952 Utrecht |
| Nationality | Dutch American |
| Fields |
Astrophysics Interdisciplinary Studies |
| Institutions | Institute for Advanced Study |
| Alma mater | University of Amsterdam |
| Doctoral advisor | Ed van den Heuvel |
| Known for |
Barnes–Hut algorithm Pseudo-synchronization |
Piet Hut (born September 26, 1952) is a Dutch-American astrophysicist, who divides his time between research in computer simulations of dense stellar systems and broadly interdisciplinary collaborations, ranging from other fields in natural science to computer science, cognitive psychology and philosophy.
He is currently the Head of the Program in Interdisciplinary Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. Asteroid 17031 Piethut is named after him, in honor of his work in planetary dynamics and for co-founding the B612 Foundation, which focuses on prevention of asteroid impacts on Earth.
In the Netherlands, Hut did a double PhD program, at Utrecht University, in particle physics under Martinus Veltman and in Amsterdam in astrophysics under Ed van den Heuvel, resulting in a PhD at the University of Amsterdam.
Previously an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Hut was in 1985, at the age of 32, appointed as a full professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. At the time, he was the youngest professor appointed there.
Hut became a corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996.
An accomplished astrophysicist, Hut is best known for the Barnes–Hut simulation algorithm, developed with Joshua Barnes. By using a tree-based data structure, the Barnes–Hut method significantly speeds up the calculation of the gravitational motion of large numbers of stars, making accessible such problems as collisions between galaxies. Barnes–Hut simulation algorithm, which has become a standard in N-body problems, reduces its complexity to N log N or N.
Hut introduced the concept of pseudo-synchronicity, which is now widely cited in the literature on tidal evolution of exoplanets.
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