I believe that "trained" is also not the correct characterization.
He got his degree in CS at a time when CS at the University of Amsterdam was part of the math department. He also took CS classes at Vrije Universiteit, under an arrangement where students could attend courses at either school.
He didn't study group or graph theory and was not interested in mathematics. Instead, he took computer classes:
> the programming classes I got at University of Amsterdam in the math department, were a pretty haphazard collection of topics that didn’t interest me. I mean, sometimes the topics interested me. I mean I remember one
semester we were all learning ALGOL 68. And the teacher was super excited, but other times, it was like numerical programming, calculating what the error is after a certain set of matrix operations. And I was not interested in anything involving floating-point numbers, basically. But Tanenbaum, or his group [at Vrije Universiteit], taught topics like operating systems, databases, networks, and languages, I believe. Yeah, Tanenbaum himself did a class where he taught like seven non-mainstream programming languages. And that was all I just soaked that up.
The math department had to "customize" his degree "a little bit for [his] situation."
There is no indication of being a trained mathematician, neither as someone trained to do mathematical research, nor trained to apply mathematics to other problems.
I have an undergrad degree in math, having taken the course for both pure and applied tracks, and even when I was fresh out of college I wouldn't say I was trained to be a mathematician.
He got his degree in CS at a time when CS at the University of Amsterdam was part of the math department. He also took CS classes at Vrije Universiteit, under an arrangement where students could attend courses at either school.
He didn't study group or graph theory and was not interested in mathematics. Instead, he took computer classes:
> the programming classes I got at University of Amsterdam in the math department, were a pretty haphazard collection of topics that didn’t interest me. I mean, sometimes the topics interested me. I mean I remember one semester we were all learning ALGOL 68. And the teacher was super excited, but other times, it was like numerical programming, calculating what the error is after a certain set of matrix operations. And I was not interested in anything involving floating-point numbers, basically. But Tanenbaum, or his group [at Vrije Universiteit], taught topics like operating systems, databases, networks, and languages, I believe. Yeah, Tanenbaum himself did a class where he taught like seven non-mainstream programming languages. And that was all I just soaked that up.
The math department had to "customize" his degree "a little bit for [his] situation."
There is no indication of being a trained mathematician, neither as someone trained to do mathematical research, nor trained to apply mathematics to other problems.
I have an undergrad degree in math, having taken the course for both pure and applied tracks, and even when I was fresh out of college I wouldn't say I was trained to be a mathematician.