Jack Minker (4 July 1927 – 9 April 2021)[3][4] was a leading authority in artificial intelligence, deductive databases, logic programming and non-monotonic reasoning.

[8] Minker was one of the founders of the area of deductive databases and disjunctive logic programming.

He has made important contributions to semantic query optimization and to cooperative and informative answers for deductive databases.

[12] He led the struggle for the release of Anatoly Shcharansky and Alexander Lerner from the late Soviet Union.

His memoir, Scientific Freedom & Human Rights: Scientists of Conscience During the Cold War, was published in 2012 by IEEE Computer Society Press.