Juris Hartmanis - Definition and Overview

Juris Hartmanis (born July 7, 1928 in Riga, Latvia) is a prominent computer scientist who, with Richard E. Stearns, received the 1993 ACM Turing Award "in recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory".

Born in Latvia, he moved to Germany after the Second World War. He received the equivalent of a Bachelor's degree in Physics from the University of Marburg, then emigrated to the United States for his Master's degree in Applied Mathematics at the University of Kansas City (now known as the University of Missouri-Kansas City). He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Caltech.

Thereafter, he worked for the General Electric Research Laboratory, developing and introducing computer science principles. In 1965, he became a professor at Cornell University, where he helped to create its computer science department and was its first chairman.

References

• Hartmanis, J., and Stearns, R. E. On the computational complexity of algorithms. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 117 (1965), 285--306.