# Jonathan Bowen

Jonathan P. Bowen (born 1956) is a British computer scientist and an Emeritus Professor at London South Bank University, where he headed the Centre for Applied Formal Methods. Prof. Bowen is also the Chairman of Museophile Limited and an adjunct professor at Southwest University in Chongqing, China. He has been a Professor of Computer Science at Birmingham City University, Visiting Professor at the Pratt Institute (New York City), University of Westminster and King's College London, and a visiting academic at University College London.

## Early life and education

Bowen was born in Oxford, the son of Humphry Bowen, and was educated at the Dragon School, Bryanston School, prior to his matriculation at University College, Oxford (Oxford University) where he received the MA degree in Engineering Science.

## Career

Bowen later worked at Imperial College, London, the Oxford University Computing Laboratory (now the Oxford University Department of Computer Science), the University of Reading, and London South Bank University. His main research was on formal methods in general and the Z notation in particular. He was Chair of the Z User Group from the early 2000s until 2011. In 2002, Bowen was elected Chair of the British Computer Society FACS Specialist Group on Formal Aspects of Computing Science. From 2005, Bowen was an Associate Editor-in-Chief of the journal Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering. He was also an associate editor on the editorial board for the ACM Computing Surveys journal, covering software engineering and formal methods. From 2008–9, he was an Associate at Praxis High Integrity Systems, working on a large industrial project using the Z notation.
Bowen's other major interest is the area of online museums. In 1994, he founded the Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp), an online museums directory that was soon adopted by the International Council of Museums (ICOM). Shortly after, he also started the Virtual Museum of Computing. In 2002, he founded Museophile Limited to help museums, especially online, for example with discussion forums. He has also worked in industry at Oxford Instruments, Marconi Instruments, Logica, Silicon Graphics, and Altran Praxis.
Bowen was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) in 2002 and of the British Computer Society (BCS) in 2004. He was a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists and is a Freeman of the City of London.

## Selected books

Jonathan Bowen has written and edited a number of books, including:
* Bowen, J.P., editor, Towards Verified Systems. Elsevier Science, Real-Time Safety Critical Systems series, volume 2, 1994. ISBN 0-444-89901-4.
* Hinchey, M.G. and Bowen, J.P., editors, Applications of Formal Methods. Prentice Hall International Series in Computer Science, 1995. ISBN 0-13-366949-1.
* Bowen, J.P., Formal Specification and Documentation using Z: A Case Study Approach. International Thomson Computer Press, International Thomson Publishing, 1996. ISBN 1-85032-230-9.
* Bowen, J.P. and Hinchey, M.G., editors, High-Integrity System Specification and Design. Springer-Verlag, London, FACIT series, 1999. ISBN 3-540-76226-4.
* Hinchey, M.G. and Bowen, J.P., editors, Industrial-Strength Formal Methods in Practice. Springer-Verlag, London, FACIT series, 1999. ISBN 1-85233-640-4.
* Hierons, R., Bowen, J.P., and Harman, M., editors, Formal Methods and Testing. Springer-Verlag, LNCS, Volume 4949, 2008. ISBN 978-3-540-78916-1.
* Börger, E., Butler, M., Bowen, J.P., and Boca, P., editors, Abstract State Machines, B and Z. Springer-Verlag, LNCS, Volume 5238, 2008. ISBN 978-3-540-87602-1.
* Boca, P.P., Bowen, J.P., and Siddiqi, J.I., editors, Formal Methods: State of the Art and New Directions. Springer, 2010. ISBN 978-1-84882-735-6, e-ISBN 978-1-84882-736-3, doi:10.1007/978-1-84882-736-3.
* Bowen, J.P., Keene, S., and Ng, K., editors, Electronic Visualisation in Arts and Culture. Springer Series on Cultural Computing, Springer, 2013. ISBN 978-1-4471-5406-8.
* Copeland, J., Bowen, J.P., Sprevak, M., Wilson, R., et al., The Turing Guide. Oxford University Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0198747826 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0198747833 (paperback).
* Hinchey, M.G., Bowen, J.P., Olderog, E.-R., editors, Provably Correct Systems. Springer International Publishing, NASA Monographs in Systems and Software Engineering series, 2017. ISBN 978-3-319-48627-7, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-48628-4.
* Giannini, T. and Bowen, J.P., editors, Museums and Digital Culture: New Perspectives and Research. Springer Series on Cultural Computing, Springer, 2019. ISBN 978-3-319-97456-9, e-ISBN 978-3-319-97457-6, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-97457-6.
* Giannini, T. and Bowen, J.P., editors, The Arts and Computational Culture: Real and Virtual Worlds. Springer Series on Cultural Computing, Springer, 2024. ISBN 978-3-031-53864-3, e-ISBN 978-3-031-53865-0, doi:10.1007/978-3-031-53865-0