Hartmanis, Juris

Juris Hartmanis, in full Juris Varlejs Hartmanis, (born July 5, 1928, Riga, Latvia), Latvian-born American mathematician and computer scientist and cowinner, with American computer scientist Richard E. Stearns, of the 1993 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science. Hartmanis and Stearns were cited in the award for their “seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory.”

At the end of World War II, Hartmanis immigrated to Germany, where he studied physics at Philipps University of Marburg before moving to the United States. Hartmanis received a master’s degree (1951) in mathematics from the University of Kansas City (now the University of Missouri at Kansas City) and a doctorate (1955) in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology. He taught at Cornell University and Ohio State University before joining the General Electric Research Laboratory in 1958. Hartmanis returned to Cornell in 1965 to head the school’s new computer science department, from which he retired in 1982 as the Walter R. Read Professor of Engineering. After retirement Hartmanis joined the science board of the Santa Fe Institute, an independent research group founded in 1984 to support multidisciplinary collaboration in the study of the principles of complexity.

Hartmanis was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1981), the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (1989), the Latvian Academy of Sciences (1990), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1992). In addition to the Turing Award, Hartmanis won a Bolzano Gold Medal of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (1995) and a Grand Medal of the Latvian Academy of Sciences (2001).