Stephen Arthur Cook (born December 14, 1939, Buffalo, New York) is a noted computer scientist.
Cook formalised the notion of NP-completeness in a famous 1971 paper "The Complexity of Theorem Proving Procedures", which also contained Cook's theorem, a proof that the boolean satisfiability problem is NP-complete. The paper left unsolved the greatest open question in theoretical computer science - whether complexity classes P and NP are equivalent.
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Stephen Arthur Cook (born December 14, 1939, Buffalo, New York) is a noted computer scientist.
Cook formalised the notion of NP-completeness in a famous 1971 paper "The Complexity of Theorem Proving Procedures", which also contained Cook's theorem, a proof that the boolean satisfiability problem is NP-complete. The paper left unsolved the greatest open question in theoretical computer science - whether complexity classes P and NP are equivalent.
Cook received the Turing Award in 1982 for his discovery. His citation reads:
For his advancement of our understanding of the complexity of computation in a significant and profound way. His seminal paper, The Complexity of Theorem Proving Procedures, presented at the 1971 ACM SIGACT Symposium on the Theory of Computing, laid the foundations for the theory of NP-Completeness. The ensuing exploration of the boundaries and nature of NP-complete class of problems has been one of the most active and important research activities in computer...
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