Cook was born in Buffalo, NY and completed his undergraduate education at the University of Michigan. He earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Harvard, then moved on to teach at U.C. Berkeley until 1970. Since then he has taught at the University of Toronto. His principal research area is computational complexity, with excursions into programming language semantics, parallel computation, and especially the interaction between logic and complexity theory. Cook is best known for his formulation of the notion of NP-completeness and his proof that satisfiability is NP-complete. He has published about one hundred papers in theoretical computer science, including fundamental results in parallel complexity.
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