Stephen Cook
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Categories: Living people | Members of the National Academy of Sciences | American computer scientists | Turing Award laureates | Fellows of the Royal Society | Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada | University of Toronto faculty | Harvard University alumni
Stephen Arthur Cook (born 1939, Buffalo, New York) is a noted computer scientist. Cook formalised the notion of NP-completeness in a famous 1971 paper "The Complexity of Theorem Proving Procedures", which also contained Cook's theorem, a proof that the boolean satisfiability problem is NP-complete. The paper left unsolved the greatest open question in theoretical computer science - whether complexity classes P and NP are equivalent. Cook received the Turing Award in 1982 for his discovery. His citation reads:
He received his Bachelor's degree in 1961 from the University of Michigan. At Harvard University, he received his Master's degree in 1962 and his Ph.D. in 1966. From 1966 to 1970 he was Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the math department, which infamously denied him tenure. In a speech celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Berkeley EECS department, fellow Turing Award winner and Berkeley professor Richard Karp said that, "It is to our everlasting shame that we were unable to persuade the math department to give him tenure." [1] Cook then joined the faculty at the University of Toronto in 1970 as an Associate Professor, and was promoted to Professor in 1975 and University Professor in 1985 in the Computer Science Department and Mathematics Department. External links
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