Juris Hartmanis
JURIS HARTMANIS (PhD '55 Cal Tech) served on the faculty at Cornell University and Ohio State University after receiving his PhD degree in mathematics, and then spent seven years as a research scientist at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York. In 1965 he returned to the Cornell faculty as the founding chairman of the newly created Department of Computer Science. He served as department chairman from 1965 to 1971 and again from 1977 to 1982. He is currently the Walter R. Read Professor Emeritus in Engineering, and the senior associate dean for computing and information science, at Cornell.
Professor Hartmanis's main research interests are in theory of computing, and particularly in computational complexity. In 1993 he shared the Turing Award with R. E. Sterns "[i]n recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory." For his research he was also awarded the Bolzano Gold Medal of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and the Grand Medal of the Latvian Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Latvian Academy of Sciences, and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Missouri and the University of Dortmund.
Professor Hartmanis chaired the influential National Research Council 1992 study Computing the Future: A Broader Agenda for Computer Science and Engineering.
Among other current activities, he is a member of the Science Board and the Science Steering Committee of the Santa Fe Institute.