Jon Louis Bentley (born February 20, 1953) is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

who is known for his contributions to computer programming, algorithms and data structure research. __NOTOC__

Education

Bentley received a B.S. in mathematical sciences from

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

in 1974. At this time he developed his most cited work, the heuristic-based partitioning algorithm k-d tree, published in 1975.See th
Jon Louis Bentley
Google Scholar profile, last accessed on 14 February 2024. He received a

M.S. A Master of Science (; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree. In contrast to the Master of Arts degree, the Master of Science degree is typically granted for studies in sciences, engineering and medicine ...

and

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in 1976 from the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC, UNC–Chapel Hill, or simply Carolina) is a public university, public research university in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States. Chartered in 1789, the university first began enrolli ...

. While a student, he also held internships at the

Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Xerox Holdings Corporation (, ) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox was the pioneer of the photocopier market, beginning with the introduc ...

and

Stanford Linear Accelerator Center SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Menlo Park, California, Menlo Park, Ca ...

Career

After receiving his Ph.D., he taught programming and computer architecture for six years as member of the faculty at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

as an assistant professor of

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

and

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

. At CMU, his students included Brian Reid,

John Ousterhout John Kenneth Ousterhout (, born October 15, 1954) is an American computer scientist. He is a professor of computer science at Stanford University. He founded Electric Cloud with John Graham-Cumming. Ousterhout was previously a professor of com ...

, Jeff Eppinger, Joshua Bloch, and

James Gosling James Arthur Gosling (born 19 May 1955) is a Canadian computer scientist, best known as the founder and lead designer behind the Java (programming language), Java programming language. Gosling was elected a member of the National Academy of E ...

, and he was one of Charles Leiserson's advisors. He published ''Writing efficient programs'' in 1982. In 1982,CSE Colloquim, Jon Bentley
bulletin from cse.uconn.edu, last accessed on 14 February 2024. Bentley moved to the Computer Science Research Center at

Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the company operates several lab ...

, where he was Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff. In this period he developed various languages, continued his algorithm research and developed various software and products for communication systems.Jon Bentley
bio published at lehigh.edu, last accessed on 14 February 2024. He co-authored an optimized

Quicksort Quicksort is an efficient, general-purpose sorting algorithm. Quicksort was developed by British computer scientist Tony Hoare in 1959 and published in 1961. It is still a commonly used algorithm for sorting. Overall, it is slightly faster than ...

algorithm with

Doug McIlroy Malcolm Douglas McIlroy (born 1932) is an American mathematician, engineer, and programmer. As of 2019 he is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. McIlroy is best known for having originally proposed Unix pipelines and de ...

. He left Bell Labs in 2001 and worked at Avaya Labs Research until 2013. In this period he developed enterprise communication systems. He found an optimal solution for the two dimensional case of Klee's measure problem: given a set of ''n''

rectangle In Euclidean geometry, Euclidean plane geometry, a rectangle is a Rectilinear polygon, rectilinear convex polygon or a quadrilateral with four right angles. It can also be defined as: an equiangular quadrilateral, since equiangular means that a ...

s, find the

area Area is the measure of a region's size on a surface. The area of a plane region or ''plane area'' refers to the area of a shape or planar lamina, while '' surface area'' refers to the area of an open surface or the boundary of a three-di ...

of their union. He and Thomas Ottmann invented the Bentley–Ottmann algorithm, an efficient

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...

for finding all intersecting pairs among a collection of line segments. He wrote the ''Programming Pearls'' column for the ''

Communications of the ACM ''Communications of the ACM'' (''CACM'') is the monthly journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). History It was established in 1958, with Saul Rosen as its first managing editor. It is sent to all ACM members. Articles are i ...

'' magazine, and later collected the articles into two books of the same name in 1986 and 1988. Bentley received the '' Dr. Dobb's'' Excellence in Programming award in 2004.

Personal life

He is a mountaineer that has climbed over one hundred 4,000 feet high peaks in the north-eastern parts of US.

Bibliography

* ''Programming Pearls'', 1986. A second edition appeared in 2016, .Programming Pearls (2nd edition)
online version at archive.org, last accessed on 14 February 2024. * ''More Programming Pearls: Confessions of a Coder'', Prentice-Hall, 1988, .More programming pearls: Confessions of a coder
online version at archive.org, last accessed on 14 February 2024. * ''Writing Efficient Programs'', Prentice-Hall, 1982, .Writing efficient programs
online version at archive.org, last accessed on 14 February 2024. * ''Divide and Conquer Algorithms for Closest Point Problems in Multidimensional Space'', Ph.D. thesis.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bentley, Jon 1953 births Living people American computer scientists American computer programmers Researchers in geometric algorithms Carnegie Mellon University faculty Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences alumni University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alumni People from Long Beach, California American mountain climbers