Jack R. Edmonds (born April 5, 1934) is an American-born and educated computer scientist and mathematician who lived and worked in Canada for much of his life.

He has made fundamental contributions to the fields of combinatorial optimization, polyhedral combinatorics, discrete mathematics and the theory of computing.

He thereafter received a master's degree in 1960 at the University of Maryland under Bruce L. Reinhart with a thesis on the problem of embedding graphs into surfaces.

Goldman proved to be a crucial influence by enabling Edmonds to work in a RAND Corporation-sponsored workshop in Santa Monica, California.

In this blossom algorithm paper, Edmonds also characterizes feasible problems as those solvable in polynomial time; this is one of the origins of the Cobham–Edmonds thesis.

He introduced polymatroids,[12] submodular flows with Richard Giles,[16] and the terms clutter and blocker in the study of hypergraphs.

[7] A recurring theme in his work[17] is to seek algorithms whose time complexity is polynomially bounded by their input size and bit-complexity.