Jaap Haartsen

Jaap Haartsen (born 1963 in The Hague) is a Dutch electrical engineer, researcher and entrepreneur, best known as the credited inventor of Bluetooth, the short-range wireless technology for consumer electronics. He took a master's degree with honors in electrical engineering at Delft University of Technology in 1986 and a doctorate there in 1990 with a thesis on programmable surface acoustic wave detection in silicon. After brief posts at Siemens and Philips he joined Ericsson in 1991, working first in the United States and then in Sweden. At the Ericsson Mobile Terminal Division in Lund, leading a group of engineers, he developed the specification for Bluetooth. He later served as chief technology officer at Tonalite, taught mobile radio communications as a part-time professor at the University of Twente between 2000 and 2008, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2015.