Jacobus Willem (Jaco) de Bakker (7 March 1939 – 13 December 2012) was a Dutch theoretical computer scientist and professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
At the last he obtained his doctorate in 1967 under Aad van Wijngaarden for the thesis: Formal Description of Programming Languages: with an application to the definition of ALGOL 60.
He was later head of the computer science department, lead the Cluster Software Engineering and was since 2002 a CWI Fellow.
He was in 1972 one of the founders of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS), where he was from 1972 to 1982 vice-chair and from 1988 member of the steering committee.
In 1989 he was awarded membership of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).