David Stifler Johnson (December 9, 1945 – March 8, 2016) was an American computer scientist specializing in algorithms and optimization.
He was the head of the Algorithms and Optimization Department of AT&T Labs Research from 1988 to 2013, and was a visiting professor at Columbia University from 2014 to 2016.
[2] Johnson was born in 1945 in Washington, D.C.[1] He graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College in 1967, then earned his S.M.
He was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1995, and as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2016.
He was the coauthor of Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness (ISBN 0-7167-1045-5) along with Michael Garey.