Jonathan Bowen

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Jonathan P. Bowen, born in 1956 in Oxford, is a British computer scientist and Emeritus Professor at London South Bank University. He is best known for his work on formal methods, especially the Z notation, and for pioneering online museum projects like the Virtual Library museums pages and the Virtual Museum of Computing.

Bowen grew up in Oxford, attended the Dragon School and Bryanston School, and studied at University College, Oxford, where he earned an MA in Engineering Science. After a stint in the software industry, he held academic positions at Imperial College London, the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, the University of Reading, and London South Bank University.

His main research focused on formal methods and the Z notation. He chaired the Z User Group from the early 2000s to 2011 and, from 2002, chaired the British Computer Society’s Specialist Group on Formal Aspects of Computing Science. He served as associate editor for Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering from 2005 and was on the editorial board of ACM Computing Surveys. He also worked in industry with Praxis High Integrity Systems on a large Z-based project (2008–2009).

Bowen founded the VLmp (Virtual Library museums pages) in 1994, one of the first online directories for museums, which was later adopted by ICOM. He then started the Virtual Museum of Computing and, in 2002, founded Museophile Limited to help museums online. He has held teaching and visiting posts at Birmingham City University, Pratt Institute, the University of Westminster, King’s College London, and University College London, and has been an adjunct professor at Southwest University in Chongqing since 2017.

His honors include the IEE Charles Babbage Premium (1994); he was elected a Fellow of the RSA in 2002 and a Fellow of the BCS in 2004. He is a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists and a Freeman of the City of London. He has written and edited several books on computing and museums.