Richard E. Stearns: key obituary facts
Is Richard E. Stearns dead? Yes. Richard E. Stearns died on August 28, 2026, at age 90.
Cause of death: Richard E. Stearns's cause of death has not been publicly confirmed.
What was Richard E. Stearns known for?
He was an American computer scientist.
More about Richard E. Stearns
Born: 5 July 1936.
Place of birth: Caldwell.
Gender: male.
Occupation: computer scientist, engineer, university teacher, editor, mathematician.
Nationality: United States.
Education: Princeton University, Carleton College.
Employer: State University of New York at Albany, New York University, General Electric.
Awards: Turing Award, Frederick W. Lanchester Prize, ACM Fellow, distinguished professor.
Also known as: Richard Edwin Stearns, Richard Stearns, Dick Stearns, R. E. Stearns.
Richard E.
Stearns, the American computer scientist who helped lay the foundations of computational complexity theory, died on August 28, 2026, aged 90. Born Richard Edwin Stearns in Caldwell, he earned a B.A.
in mathematics from Carleton College in 1958 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1961, where his dissertation, Three person cooperative games without side payments, was supervised by Harold W. Kuhn. Stearns went on to work at the State University of New York at Albany, where he became distinguished professor emeritus of computer science, and his career also included posts at New York University and General Electric. With Juris Hartmanis, he received the 1993 ACM Turing Award for the seminal paper that established the field of computational complexity theory. He was elected an ACM Fellow in 1994.