Jon Bentley (computer scientist)

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Jon Louis Bentley (born February 20, 1953 in Long Beach,

California)[1] is an American computer scientist who is Jon Bentley
credited with the heuristic-based partitioning algorithm k-d Born Jon Louis Bentley
tree. February 20, 1953
Long Beach, California, US
Bentley received a B.S. in mathematical sciences from
Stanford University in 1974, and M.S. and Ph.D in 1976 Alma mater University of North Carolina at
from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; while a Chapel Hill
student, he also held internships at the Xerox Palo Alto Stanford University
Research Center and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.[1] Thesis Divide and conquer algorithms for
After receiving his Ph.D., he joined the faculty at Carnegie closest point problems in
Mellon University as an assistant professor of computer multidimensional space (1976)
science and mathematics.[1] At CMU, his students included
Doctoral Donald Ford Stanat
Brian Reid, John Ousterhout, Jeff Eppinger, Joshua Bloch,
advisor
and James Gosling, and he was one of Charles Leiserson's
advisors.[2] Later, Bentley moved to Bell Laboratories. Doctoral Charles E. Leiserson
students Catherine McGeoch
He found an optimal solution for the two dimensional case of
Klee's measure problem: given a set of n rectangles, find the area of their union. He and Thomas Ottmann
invented the BentleyOttmann algorithm, an efficient algorithm for finding all intersecting pairs among a
collection of line segments. He wrote the Programming Pearls column for the Communications of the ACM
magazine, and later collected the articles into two books of the same name.

Bentley received the Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming award in 2004.

Bibliography
Programming Pearls (2nd Edition), ISBN 0-201-65788-0.
More Programming Pearls: Confessions of a Coder, ISBN 0-201-11889-0.
Writing Efficient Programs, ISBN 0-13-970244-X.
Divide and Conquer Algorithms in Multidimensional Space, Ph.D. thesis.

References
1. Biography from Bentley, J. L.; Ottmann, T. A. (1979), "Algorithms for reporting and counting geometric intersections",
IEEE Transactions on Computers, C28 (9): 643647, doi:10.1109/TC.1979.1675432(https://doi.org/10.1109%2FTC.1
979.1675432).
2. Jon Bentley (https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=50096)at the Mathematics Genealogy Project

External links
www.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/pearls/code.html on GitHub
Lucent Technologies press release (dead link)
bug in Jon Bentley's binary search - google research
The C Programming Language, both editions had shown the solution to the bug discussed in the
above. In the second edition, it is in section 6.4 (Pointers to Structures).

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title=Jon_Bentley_(computer_scientist)&oldid=782766390"
Categories: 1953 births Living people American computer scientists American computer programmers
Researchers in geometric algorithms Carnegie Mellon University faculty Stanford University alumni
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alumni People from Long Beach, California

This page was last edited on 29 May 2017, at 01:34.

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