Brouwer's varied research interests include several branches of
discrete mathematics, particularly
graph theory,
finite geometry and
coding theory. He has published dozens of papers in graph theory and other areas of
combinatorics, many of them in collaboration with other researchers. His co-authors include at least 9 of the co-authors of
Paul Erdős, giving him an
Erdős number of 2.
Hack In December 1984, while at the
Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), he made the first public release of
Hack on
Usenet.
Hack was an implementation of
Rogue originally written in 1982 by
Jay Fenlason and a few others, but Brouwer heavily modified and expanded it. He distributed a total of four versions of
Hack between December 1984 and July 1985. The
source code was released as
free software, and it was widely copied, played, and
ported to multiple computer platforms. When Mike Stephenson brought together a large development team via Usenet to produce an enhanced version in 1987 incorporating changes from many of the
Hack derivatives, they respected Brouwer's wishes by renaming their game
NetHack, as Brouwer might "...eventually release a new version of his own."
Linux kernel Brouwer has also been involved with the development of
Unix-like computer
operating systems based on the Linux kernel. He was previously the
maintainer of the
man pager program man and the maintainer of the Linux man-pages project (from 1995 to 2004), and he is a kernel maintainer in the areas of disk geometry and
partition handling. Brouwer also serves as specialist in security aspects of Unix and Linux for EiPSI (Eindhoven Institute for the Protection of Systems and Information), TU/e's
information security research institute. ==Selected publications==