Jon Bentley (computer scientist)
American computer scientist (born 1953)
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Through Computer science, Mathematics and Quicksort
Education
Bentley received a B.S. in mathematical sciences from Stanford University in 1974. At this time he developed his most cited work, the heuristic-based partitioning algorithm k-d tree, published in 1975.
He received a M.S. and PhD in 1976 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While a student, he also held internships at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
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Career
After receiving his Ph.D., he taught programming and computer architecture for six years as member of the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University as an assistant professor of computer science and mathematics. At CMU, his students included Brian Reid, John Ousterhout, Jeff Eppinger, Joshua Bloch, and James Gosling, and he was one of Charles Leiserson's advisors. He published Writing efficient programs in 1982.
In 1982, Bentley moved to the Computer Science Research Center at Bell Laboratories, 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. He co-authored an optimized Quicksort algorithm with Doug McIlroy.
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 rectangles, find the area of their union. He and Thomas Ottmann invented the Bentley–Ottmann algorithm, an efficient algorithm for finding all intersecting pairs among a collection of line segments.
He wrote the Programming Pearls column for the Communications of the ACM 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.