Jon Bentley

Jon Louis Bentley (born February 20, 1953) is an American computer scientist who is known for his contributions to computer programming, algorithms and data structure research.

Education Bentley received a B.S. in mathematical sciences from Stanford University in 1974. At this time he developed his most cited work, the heuristic-based partitioning algorithm k-d tree, published in 1975.

He received a M.S. and PhD in 1976 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While a student, he also held internships at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He published Writing efficient programs in 1982. Bentley moved to the Computer Science Research Center at Bell Laboratories, where he was Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff. In this period he developed various languages, continued his algorithm research and developed various software and products for communication systems. He co-authored an optimized Quicksort algorithm with Doug McIlroy.

He left Bell Labs in 2001 and worked at Avaya Labs Research until 2013. In this period he developed enterprise communication systems. More Programming Pearls: Confessions of a Coder, Prentice-Hall, 1988. Writing Efficient Programs, Prentice-Hall, 1982. Divide and Conquer Algorithms for Closest Point Problems in Multidimensional Space, Ph.D. thesis.