Draft:Harry B. Hunt, III

• Comment: I am uncertain about this as while he has reasonable citations, there are no indications of major awards. Ldm1954 (talk) 14:51, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

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Harry Bowen Hunt, III
Born	(1949-07-01) July 1, 1949 Sharon, Pennsylvania
Alma mater	Case Western Reserve University (B.S. & M.S.) Cornell University (Ph.D.)
Scientific career
Institutions	University at Albany
Doctoral advisor	John Hopcroft
Other academic advisors	Juris Hartmanis
Doctoral students	Madhav Marathe Sandeep Shukla Jingnan Xie

Harry Bowen Hunt, III (born July 01, 1949) is an American computer scientist and professor at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is known for his contributions to theoretical computer science, particularly in the areas of complexity theory, automata theory, and formal language theory. Over the course of his career, Hunt has authored and co-authored research papers in journals such as the Journal of the ACM, SIAM Journal on Computing, Acta Informatica, and Theoretical Computer Science.

Hunt graduated with a B.S and M.S. in mathematics from Case Western Reserve University and then received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1973 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled On the Time and Tape Complexity of Languages, under the supervision of John Hopcroft. At Cornell University, Hunt and Juris Hartmanis published a paper studying whether deterministic and non-deterministic context-sensitive languages are equivalent. Their work is a contribution to computational complexity theory. Hunt is now a professor of Computer Science at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York. His collaborations with eminent scientists, including Richard E. Stearns, a co-recipient of the 1993 Turing Award, and Daniel J. Rosenkrantz, have produced results that have advanced the field of theoretical computer science, including the development of NC-approximation schemes for various NP- and PSPACE-Hard problems in geometric graphs.. Hunt and Stearns also investigated sum-of-products problems where the addition and multiplication operators are drawn from commutative semirings. They demonstrated that such problems can be solved using fewer operations if the problem exhibits favorable structural properties captured by a structure tree. In this context, "favorable structural properties" refers to either a small weighted depth for top-down processing or a small channelwidth for bottom-up processing. Channelwidth corresponds to the concept of treewidth when sum-of-products problems are visualized graphically, but the structure tree offers a clearer perspective for algebraic interpretations. Furthermore, with the inclusion of an algebraic condition, they extended the structure tree framework to handle quantified formulas. Finally, they established a strong connection between sub-linear space complexity and OR-of-AND problems with sub-linearly bounded treewidth.

Selected publications

• J. Hartmanis, H.B. Hunt III, The LBA problem and its importance in the theory of computing, in: SIAM AMS Vol. 7 on Complexity of Computing, 1974, 1–26 [1]

• H.B. Hunt III, M.V. Marathe, V. Radhakrishnan, S.S. Ravi, D.J. Rosenkrantz, and R.E. Stearns. 1998. NC-Approximation Schemes for NP- and PSPACE-Hard Problems for Geometric Graphs. J. Algorithms 26, 2 (feb. 1998), 238–274. NC-Approximation Schemes for NP- and PSPACE-Hard Problems for Geometric Graphs

• H.B. Hunt III, M.V. Marathe, V. Radhakrishnan, and R.E. Stearns. 1998. The Complexity of Planar Counting Problems. SIAM J. Comput. 27, 4 (Aug. 1998), 1142–1167. [2]

• H.B. Hunt III. 1973. On the time and tape complexity of languages I. In Proceedings of the fifth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing (STOC '73). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 10–19. On the time and tape complexity of languages I

• H.B. Hunt III, D.J. Rosenkrantz, and T.G. Szymanski. 1976. On the equivalence, containment, and covering problems for the regular and context-free languages. J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 12, 2 (April, 1976), 222–268. On the equivalence, containment, and covering problems for the regular and context-free languages

• H.B. Hunt III and D.J. Rosenkrantz. 1977. On Equivalence and Containment Problems for Formal Languages. J. ACM 24, 3 (July 1977), 387–396. On Equivalence and Containment Problems for Formal Languages

• P.A. Bloniarz, H.B. Hunt III, and D.J. Rosenkrantz. 1984. Algebraic Structures with Hard Equivalence and Minimization Problems. J. ACM 31, 4 (Oct. 1984), 879–904. Algebraic Structures with Hard Equivalence and Minimization Problems

• H.B. Hunt III, T.G. Szymanski, and J.D. Ullman. 1975. On the complexity of LR(k) testing. Commun. ACM 18, 12 (Dec. 1975), 707–716. On the complexity of LR(k) testing

• J. Xie and H.B. Hunt III. 2023. On the undecidability and descriptional complexity of synchronized regular expressions. Acta Inf. 60, 3 (Sep 2023), 257–278. On the undecidability and descriptional complexity of synchronized regular expressions