John E. Hershberger (born 1959) is an American computer scientist and software professional, a principal engineer at Mentor Graphics Corporation since 1993.
He was a member of the technical staff at the Digital Equipment Corporation Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, California, until 1993, when he joined Mentor Graphics as a software engineer and project leader.
One of the most significant achievement of this period is his algorithm (joint work with Subhash Suri) to compute shortest paths among polygonal obstacles in the plane using only O(n log n) time.
This algorithm was a vast improvement over the roughly quadratic running time achievable by visibility-graph-based methods, and resolved a problem that had been open and intensely studied for years.
Kinetic data structures, proposed by Leonidas Guibas, Julien Basch and Hershberger, have been and continue to be influential in computational geometry.