Richard E. Stearns

Richard Edwin Stearns
Richard Stearns in 2009
Born	(1936-07-05) July 5, 1936 Caldwell, New Jersey
Institutions	University at Albany
Alma mater	Princeton University
Doctoral advisor	Harold W. Kuhn
Doctoral students	Madhav V. Marathe (jointly with Harry B. Hunt III) Thomas C. O'Connell
Notable awards	ACM Turing Award (1993) Frederick W. Lanchester Prize (1995)

Richard Edwin Stearns (born July 5, 1936) is a prominent computer scientist who, with Juris Hartmanis, received the 1993 ACM Turing Award "in recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory" (Hartmanis and Stearns, 1965). In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Stearns earned his PhD from Princeton University in 1961. His PhD thesis adviser was Harold W. Kuhn. Stearns is now Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

Bibliography

• . A first systematic study of language operations that preserve regular languages.
• . Contains the time hierarchy theorem, one of the theorems that shaped the field of computational complexity theory.
• . Answers a basic question about deterministic pushdown automata: it is decidable whether a given deterministic pushdown automaton accepts a regular language.
• . Introduces LL parsers, which play an important role in compiler design.

External links

• Richard Stearns at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• DBLP entry
• Personal homepage at the University at Albany