- Jon Bentley
Jon Louis Bentley is a researcher in the field of computer science. Bentley worked on his MS and Ph.D at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before eventually becoming a Professor ofComputer Science andMathematics atCarnegie-Mellon University . At CMU, his students included Brian Reid,John Ousterhout ,Jeff Eppinger , andJames Gosling . Bentley was one of Charles Leiserson's advisors. He found an optimal solution for the two dimensional case ofKlee's measure problem : given a set of "n"rectangle s, find the area of their union.Bentley received the Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming award in 2004.
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. He has published or presented over 200 papers. A bug in the C language implementation of his binary search algorithm where adding two large numbers caused overflow, has been incorrectly described by some as a bug in the algorithm itself. The bug in the C implementation was not discovered for two decades. Interestingly, The C Programming Language had included a binary search algorithm using pointers which had introduced a fix - long before Bentley's book was published - due to a problem with C syntax rules.While presenting a Google Tech Talk on August 9th, 2007, he stated that "as a guy who goes around wearing
West Point t-shirts" he was not "all that fond of" the organizationAmnesty International . [cite web |url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMnn0Jq0J-E|title=Three Beautiful Quicksorts |accessdate=2007-10-20 |format= |work= ]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
* [http://www.bell-labs.com/news/2000/april/3/1.html Lucent Technologies press release]
* [http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about-it-nearly.html Blog entry about this bug]
* The C Programming Language, first edition - this did not describe the bug; it only showed the solution, which is shown in the above blog entry
* [http://netlib.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/pearls/ Programming Pearls, Second Edition - official site]
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
