Richard Edwin Stearns (born July 5, 1936) is a prominent

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (a ...

who, with

Juris Hartmanis Juris Hartmanis (July 5, 1928 – July 29, 2022) was a Latvian-born American computer scientist and computational theorist who, with Richard E. Stearns, received the 1993 ACM Turing Award "in recognition of their seminal paper which establishe ...

, received the 1993 ACM

Turing Award The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in compu ...

"in recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of

computational complexity theory In theoretical computer science and mathematics, computational complexity theory focuses on classifying computational problems according to their resource usage, and relating these classes to each other. A computational problem is a task solved ...

". In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Stearns graduated with a B.A. in

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

from

Carleton College Carleton College ( ) is a private liberal arts college in Northfield, Minnesota. Founded in 1866, it had 2,105 undergraduate students and 269 faculty members in fall 2016. The 200-acre main campus is between Northfield and the 800-acre Cowlin ...

in 1958. He then received his Ph.D. in mathematics from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

in 1961 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled ''Three person

cooperative games Cooperative game may refer to: * Cooperative board game, board games in which players work together to achieve a common goal * Cooperative game theory In game theory, a cooperative game (or coalitional game) is a game with competition between gro ...

without side payments'', under the supervision of Harold W. Kuhn. Stearns is now

Distinguished Professor Distinguished Professor is an academic title given to some top tenured professors in a university, school, or department. Some distinguished professors may have endowed chairs. In the United States Often specific to one institution, titles such ...

Emeritus of Computer Science at the

University at Albany The State University of New York at Albany, commonly referred to as the University at Albany, UAlbany or SUNY Albany, is a public research university with campuses in Albany, Rensselaer, and Guilderland, New York. Founded in 1844, it is on ...

, which is part of the

State University of New York The State University of New York (SUNY, , ) is a system of public colleges and universities in the State of New York. It is one of the largest comprehensive system of universities, colleges, and community colleges in the United States. Led by ...

Bibliography

*. A first systematic study of language operations that preserve

regular language In theoretical computer science and formal language theory, a regular language (also called a rational language) is a formal language that can be defined by a regular expression, in the strict sense in theoretical computer science (as opposed to ...

s. * . Contains the

time hierarchy theorem In computational complexity theory, the time hierarchy theorems are important statements about time-bounded computation on Turing machines. Informally, these theorems say that given more time, a Turing machine can solve more problems. For example, ...

, one of the theorems that shaped the field of

. *. Answers a basic question about deterministic pushdown automata: it is decidable whether a given deterministic pushdown automaton accepts a

. *. Introduces LL parsers, which play an important role in

compiler design In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs t ...

References

External links

* * * 1936 births American computer scientists Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Living people Turing Award laureates University at Albany, SUNY faculty People from Caldwell, New Jersey Princeton University alumni {{compu-scientist-stub