Richard E. Stearns

Richard Edwin Stearns was born on 1936-07-05 in Caldwell, New Jersey, near the Grover Cleveland birthplace. His father, Edwin I. Stearns, studied chemistry at Lafayette and chemical engineering at RPI, worked at American Cyanamid, and completed a Rutgers Ph.D. while Dick was young; he was also an amateur ornithologist. His mother, Winifred Scales, studied chemistry at Swarthmore and discussed mathematics with him at home. He grew up in North Plainfield and Plainfield with brother Robert and sister Dinny. Childhood reading and his mother's explanation of even permutations on a sliding puzzle oriented him toward rigorous math. At Plainfield High School, strong algebra and three years of advanced mathematics under Art Smith prepared him for college.

Stearns chose Carleton College without visiting, seeking a small co-educational liberal-arts environment. He earned a B.A. in mathematics in 1958, befriended Roger Kirchner, and wrote an honors thesis on Arrow's paradox probabilities that led to a Math Monthly publication. A campus visit by John Kemeny steered him to Princeton. Under Harold W. Kuhn, with substantial mentoring from Robert Aumann, he completed a 1961 Ph.D. in mathematics on three-person cooperative games without side payments. He later said Kuhn urged him to find what he was good at and to write theorems in clear English.

After summer and then permanent work at GE Research Laboratory (from 1961), Stearns collaborated with Juris Hartmanis on sequential-machine decomposition and then on measuring the resources algorithms need. Using Yamada's real-time countable functions, they defined complexity classes and proved a time hierarchy, published in 1965 as On the computational complexity of algorithms. He later worked with Hennie on tighter time hierarchy results, with Lewis on space complexity and LL parsers, and with Rosenkrantz and Lewis on compilers, TSP approximations, and database serializability. He moved to SUNY Albany in 1978, chaired CS (1982-1989), collaborated with Harry Hunt III, and remained Distinguished Professor Emeritus after retiring in 2000. He also continued game-theory work, including collaboration acknowledged in Aumann and Maschler's Lanchester Prize-winning volume.

Stearns married Charlotte A. Reed in 1963 after meeting her in a Schenectady folk-dance group; they later favored contra and English country dancing. ACM's official biography lists children Chris R. Stearns and Dr. Elizabeth R. Gumustop. He played bridge for decades and reached Silver Life Master. In the early 1970s he joined Democratic politics in Niskayuna and served as party chairman for multiple terms. After retiring he lived with Charlotte in Slingerlands, New York; Carleton's farewell lists residence in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at the time of his death.

In his ACM oral history Stearns said he did mathematics for pleasure and that proving theorems was the ultimate rush. He advised young researchers to do what they love, choose the right model, and think top-down. He described his career path as shaped by chance invitations (Carleton, Princeton via Kemeny, GE via Kirchner) more than grand planning, with the deliberate switch from GE to Albany as a major exception. He framed Democratic committee work as a duty to contribute to society's benefit. He never saw a computer until GE and long identified first as a mathematician who proves theorems, even after joining ACM and CS departments.

The Hartmanis-Stearns framework made resource-bounded computation a mathematical subject: complexity classes, hierarchy theorems, and a vocabulary (including DTIME-style thinking) that structure modern theory, cryptography, and algorithm design. LL parsing entered compiler practice; serializability became standard database teaching. Students such as Madhav V. Marathe carried complexity and dynamical-systems ideas forward. Community remembrances after his death returned to the May 1963 photograph of Stearns and Hartmanis with their main theorem on a blackboard, an image Stearns shared for the paper's 50th anniversary.

ACM A.M. Turing Award, 1993, shared with Juris Hartmanis, for the seminal complexity paper. ACM Fellow, 1994. Frederick W. Lanchester Prize, 1995 (associated with the Aumann-Maschler repeated-games book acknowledging Stearns's collaboration). Distinguished Professor, State University of New York / University at Albany (after the Turing Award). Carleton College outstanding alumni recognition (nominated by Roger Kirchner). Heidelberg Laureate Forum invitee and lecturer (2016-2017 era). Long service as SIAM Journal on Computing editor and SIGACT executive committee member-at-large.

Stearns's ACM Turing Award oral history (video and PDF transcript, interviewed by Dan Rosenkrantz, 2017) is the main long-form record. Short ACM clips cover writing the complexity paper, space complexity with Lewis, and first exposure to computers. Tom Geller's Heidelberg Laureate Forum interview (2017; published 2018) and HLF lectures circulate on YouTube. Local TV briefly covered the Turing Award with a terminal photo; Stearns recalled the announcer saying it has something to do with algorithms. A plane anecdote he told: a passenger told his daughter meeting him was better than having Taylor Swift on the plane.

No major public controversies are documented in the ACM laureate biography, oral history, Carleton farewell, or standard encyclopedic summaries used for this profile. Professional life is described as collaborative laboratory and university research without scandal narratives in those sources.

Richard E. Stearns died on 2026-08-29 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, at age 90, per Carleton College alumni farewells (class of 1958; residence Ann Arbor, MI). Some Wikipedia scrapes have shown August 28; this profile uses August 29 following Carleton and aligned community notices. Cause of death: not made public in the sources reviewed.