Juris Hartmanis
contemporaryAnalytic Philosophy of Computer Science1928 – 2022
Juris Hartmanis was a Latvian-American computer scientist who co-founded the field of computational complexity theory. With Richard Stearns, he established the formal framework for classifying problems by the time and space resources required to solve them, work that earned them the 1993 Turing Award. He spent most of his career at Cornell University, where he founded and chaired the Computer Science department.
Notable Achievements
1
Co-founded computational complexity theory with Richard Stearns (1965)
2
Received the ACM Turing Award in 1993 for foundational work on complexity
3
Founded the Computer Science department at Cornell University
4
Authored 'Feasible Computations and Provable Complexity Properties' (1978)
5
Argued for treating computational complexity as an empirical, quasi-physical property of mathematics