Professor Van Dusen is a fictional character in a series of detective short stories and two novels by Jacques Futrelle. Some of the short stories were originally published in The Saturday Evening Post and the Boston American. In the stories Professor Van Dusen solves a variety of different mysteries together with his friend Hutchinson Hatch, reporter of a fictional newspaper called ‘The Daily New Yorker’. The professor is known as the ‘Thinking Machine’, solving problems by the remorseless application of logic. His catchphrases include, ‘Two and two always equal four, ‘ ‘Nothing is impossible’, and ‘All things that start must go somewhere.’ Jacques Heath Futrelle (1875–1912) was an American journalist and mystery writer. He is best known for writing short detective stories. Futrelle died in the sinking of the RMS Titanic.