Richard Edwin Stearns (July 5, 1936 – August 29, 2026) was an American 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". In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Life and career Stearns graduated with a B.A. in mathematics from Carleton College in 1958. He then received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1961 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled Three person cooperative games without side payments, under the supervision of Harold W. Kuhn. Stearns was Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.
Steams died on August 29, 2026, at the age of 90.In Memoriam: Richard E. Stearns (1936-2026)
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.
References
External links