Jon Bentley

Who is Jon Bentley?

Jon Louis Bentley is a researcher in the field of computer science. He is credited with the invention of the k-d tree.

Bentley received a B.S. in mathematical sciences from Stanford University in 1974, and M.S. and Ph.D 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. After receiving his Ph.D., he joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University as an assistant professor of computer science and mathematics. At CMU, his students included Brian Reid, John Ousterhout, Jeff Eppinger, Joshua Bloch, and James Gosling, and he was one of Charles Leiserson's advisors. Later, Bentley moved to Bell Laboratories.

He found an optimal solution for the two dimensional case of Klee's measure problem: given a set of n rectangles, find the area of their union. He and Thomas Ottmann invented the Bentley–Ottmann algorithm, an efficient algorithm for finding all intersecting pairs among a collection of line segments. 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.