[2] He is renowned for his work on developmental psychology and the application of dynamical systems theory in social science.

He is one of the members of the "Dutch School of Dynamic Systems" who proposed to apply time series data to study second language development along with de Bot, Lowie, and Verspoor.

Between 1967 and 1971 van Geert studied psychology and educational sciences at the Ghent University, Belgium.

[3] Paul van Geert was the first to apply the logistic function to model first language development in 1991.

[6] He supervised his future colleague at the University of Groningen, Marijn van Dijk, who obtained her PhD Degree in 2004.