John Hopcroft
- In full:
- John Edward Hopcroft
- Born:
- October 7, 1939, Seattle, Washington, U.S. (age 85)
- Also Known As:
- John Edward Hopcroft
- Awards And Honors:
- Turing Award (1986)
John Hopcroft (born October 7, 1939, Seattle, Washington, U.S.) is an American computer scientist and cowinner of the 1986 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for “fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures.” In addition, Hopcroft made major contributions to automata theory and computational complexity.
Hopcroft earned a bachelor’s degree (1961) in electrical engineering from Seattle University and a master’s degree (1962) and doctorate (1964) in electrical engineering from Stanford University. After leaving Stanford, Hopcroft held appointments at Princeton University (1964–67) and at Cornell University (1967– ), where he became the IBM Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics in 2004.
Hopcroft is the author of Formal Languages and Their Relation to Automata (1971), and, with the American computer scientists Jeffrey D. Ullman and Alfred V. Aho, The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms (1974), Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation (1979), and Data Structures and Algorithms (1983).
Hopcroft was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1987), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1987), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (1987), the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (1989), and the Association for Computing Machinery (1994). Hopcroft served (1992–98) on the U.S. National Science Board, which oversees the U.S. National Science Foundation. His other honours included the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) John von Neumann Medal (2010).