Van Emden was born in Velp, the Netherlands, and his early childhood was spent mostly in the Dutch East Indies.

His thesis supervisor was Adriaan van Wijngaarden, who also supervised another notable Dutch computer scientist Edsger W.

[2] Van Emden spent 1971 to 1972 as a postdoctoral fellow at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center and then joined the Machine Intelligence group at the University of Edinburgh as a research fellow under Donald Michie.

His visiting fellow positions include University of Edinburgh in 1980, Imperial College (UK) in 1982–1983, and NWO (Netherlands) in 2000–2001.

[5] Between 2008 and 2019 van Emden wrote a collection of essays on the practice of programming and the history and philosophy of computing on a blog entitled A Programmer's Place.