John Leroy Hennessy (born September 22, 1952) is an American computer scientist and chairman of Alphabet Inc. Hennessy is one of the founders of MIPS Technologies and Atheros, serving as 10th president of Stanford University from 2000 to 2016. He was succeeded as president by Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Marc Andreessen called him "the godfather of Silicon Valley."
Early life and education
Hennessy was raised in Huntington, New York, as one of six children.
He earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Villanova University, and his master's degree and Doctor of Philosophy in computer science from Stony Brook University.
Hennessy has been a board member 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, Hennessy was presented a khata by the 14th Dalai Lama before the latter addressed Maples Pavilion.
In December 2010, Hennessy coauthored an editorial with Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust urging the passage of the DREAM Act; the legislation did not pass the 111th United States Congress.
In 2013, Hennessy became a judge for the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. He has remained on the judging panel for the subsequent awards in 2015 and 2017.
In June 2015, Hennessy announced that he would step down as Stanford president in summer 2016.
In 2016, Hennessy co-founded the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program; he serves as its inaugural director. The program has a $750 million endowment to fully fund graduate students at Stanford for up to three years. The inaugural class of 51 scholars from 21 countries arrived at Stanford in the fall of 2018.
In February 2018, Hennessy was announced as the new 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 a history of strong interest and involvement in college-level computer education. He co-authored, with David Patterson, two well-known books on computer architecture, Computer Organization and Design: the Hardware/Software Interface and Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, which introduced the DLX RISC architecture. They have been widely used as textbooks for graduate and undergraduate courses since 1990.
Hennessy also contributed to updating Donald Knuth's MIX processor to the MMIX. Both are model computers used in Knuth's classic series, The Art of Computer Programming. MMIX is Knuth's DLX equivalent.
Awards and honors
- Elected to the National Academy of Engineering: 1992 For innovations in computer architecture and software techniques for reduced instruction set computers (RISC), and for quantitative evaluation methods for modern computer architectures.
- BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award 2020 in Information and Communication Technologies.
- In 2020, he received from the UC Berkeley Academic Senate the Clark Kerr Award for distinguished leadership in higher education.
- In 2022, he was awarded the Charles Stark Draper Prize by the National Academy of Engineering alongside Steve Furber, David Patterson and Sophie Wilson for contributions to the invention, development, and implementation of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) chips.
- In 2023, he was awarded an honorary doctorate of science by the University of Hong Kong.
Selected publications
- Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach