John Hopcroft

John Edward Hopcroft is an American theoretical computer scientist and professor emeritus at Cornell University who earned his PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1964, and whose textbooks on the theory of computation and data structures, co-authored with Jeffrey Ullman and Alfred Aho, became standard references used to teach generations of computer science students. With Robert Tarjan, Hopcroft developed foundational algorithms for graph and data structure problems, including efficient methods for planarity testing that determine whether a graph can be drawn on a plane without its edges crossing. He shared the ACM Turing Award with Tarjan in 1986 for fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures. Hopcroft later held international academic leadership roles including co-director of the Center on Frontiers of Computing Studies at Peking University and director of the John Hopcroft Center for Computer Science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and he received the IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2010.