Born in
Goingarijp, the Netherlands, Zantema received his PhD in
algebraic number theory in 1983 at the
University of Amsterdam under supervision of
Hendrik Lenstra Jr. for the thesis, entitled "Integer Valued Polynomials in Algebraic Number Theory." After graduation, Zantema spent a few years of employment in the industry before he switched to computer science: from 1987 to 2000 at
Utrecht University and since 2000 at
Eindhoven University of Technology. Since 2007 he was also a part-time full professor at
Radboud University in Nijmegen. His main achievements are in
term rewriting systems, in particular in automatically proving
termination of term rewriting. His name is attached to Zantema's problem, namely whether the string rewrite system
0011 -> 111000 terminates. He also contributed to the theory and especially the visualisation of streams. This led to the book "Playing with Infinity". == Selected publications ==