John Leroy Hennessy (born September 22, 1952) is an American computer scientist and chairman of Alphabet Inc. Hennessy helped start MIPS Technologies and Atheros. He served as the 10th president of Stanford University from 2000 to 2016. Marc Tessier-Lavigne became president after him. Marc Andreessen called him "the godfather of Silicon Valley."
Hennessy and David Patterson received the 2017 Turing Award for their work in creating the reduced instruction set computer (RISC) design, which is now used in 99% of new computer chips.
Early life and education
Hennessy was born in Huntington, New York, and is one of six siblings. His father worked as an aerospace engineer, and his mother was a teacher before becoming a homemaker. Hennessy has Irish Catholic heritage, with some of his ancestors coming to America during the potato famine in the 1800s.
He received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Villanova University. Later, he earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in computer science from Stony Brook University.
Career and research
Hennessy joined Stanford University as a faculty member in 1977. In 1981, he started the MIPS project to study RISC processors. In 1984, he used his sabbatical year to create MIPS Computer Systems Inc. to sell the technology from his research. In 1987, he became the Willard and Inez Kerr Bell Endowed Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Hennessy led Stanford's Computer System Laboratory from 1989 to 1993, a research center managed by Stanford's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments. He served as chair of the Department of Computer Science from 1994 to 1996 and as Dean of the School of Engineering from 1996 to 1999.
In 1999, Stanford President Gerhard Casper chose Hennessy to replace Condoleezza Rice as Provost of Stanford University. When Casper left his role in 2000 to focus on teaching, the Stanford Board of Trustees named Hennessy as the next president. In 2008, Hennessy earned a salary of $1,091,589 ($702,771 base salary, $259,592 deferred benefits, $129,226 non-tax benefits), making him the 23rd highest-paid university president in the United States.
Hennessy has served on the boards of Google (later Alphabet Inc.), Cisco Systems, Atheros Communications, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2008.
On October 14, 2010, the 14th Dalai Lama gave Hennessy a khata before speaking at Maples Pavilion. In December 2010, Hennessy wrote an editorial with Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust to support the DREAM Act. The law did not pass the 111th United States Congress.
In 2013, Hennessy became a judge for the first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. He remained on the judging panel for the awards in 2015 and 2017. In June 2015, Hennessy announced he would leave his role as Stanford president in summer 2016.
In 2016, Hennessy co-founded the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program and is its first director. The program has a $750 million fund to fully support graduate students at Stanford for up to three years. The first group of 51 students from 21 countries joined Stanford in the fall of 2018.
In February 2018, Hennessy became Chairman of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company. That same year, his book Leading Matters: Lessons from My Journey was published by Stanford University Press.
Hennessy has always been interested in teaching computer science at the college level. He co-wrote two well-known books on computer architecture with David Patterson: Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface and Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach. These books introduced the DLX RISC architecture and have been used as textbooks since 1990.
Hennessy also helped update Donald Knuth's MIX processor to MMIX. Both are model computers used in Knuth's classic series, The Art of Computer Programming. MMIX is Knuth's version of DLX.
Awards and Honors:
– Elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1992 for innovations in computer architecture and for methods to evaluate modern computer designs.
– IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award in 1994 for contributions to evaluating computer architectures and implementing RISC technology.
– Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1997.
– Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 2001.
– ACM SIGARCH ISCA Influential Paper Award in 2004 for a 1989 paper on high-performance cache systems.
– Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2007 for contributions to education and computer architecture.
– IEEE Medal of Honor in 2012 for pioneering RISC processors and leadership in computer engineering and education.
– Honorary Degree in Mathematics from the University of Waterloo in 2012.
– Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in the UK in 2017.
– Turing Award in 2017 for developing a systematic approach to computer architecture design.
– BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in 2020 for work in information and communication technologies.
– Clark Kerr Award in 2020 for leadership in higher education.
– Charles Stark Draper Prize in 2022 for work on R