Jonathan Bowen

His contributions also include works on the history of computing, especially Alan Turing.

Jonathan Bowen studied at Dragon School, University College, Oxford and Bryanston School. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is informatics, software engineering and information technology. Archives & Museum Informatics is recorded as an influence. Employment is recorded with University College London, Imperial College London and King's College London. Positions recorded include director. Works named in the authority record are The Turing Guide, Museums and Digital Culture, Digital Technologies and the Museum Experience, Towards Verified Systems, Applications of Formal Methods and Formal Specification and Documentation Using Z. Distinctions recorded are Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Fellow of the British Computer Society, liveryman and Charles Babbage Premium.

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.

After initially working in the software industry, he later joined 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 to 2009, 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. From 2000 to 2006, Bowen headed the Centre for Applied Formal Methods as Professor of Computing at London South Bank University. From 2002, Bowen has also been the chairman of Museophile Limited and from 2017 he has been 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. Bowen has also worked in industry at Oxford Instruments, Marconi Instruments, Logica, Silicon Graphics, and Altran Praxis.

In 1994, Bowen received the IEE Charles Babbage Premium for the best paper in the Software Engineering Journal. 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.