John Lewis Rhodes (born July 16, 1937) is an American mathematician known for work in the theory of semigroups, finite-state automata, and algebraic approaches to differential equations.

In the fall of 1955, Rhodes entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology intending to major in physics, but he soon switched to mathematics, earning his B.S.

[3] After a year on an NSF fellowship in Paris, he became a member of the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he spent his entire teaching career.

In the late 1960s, Rhodes wrote Applications of Automata Theory and Algebra: Via the Mathematical Theory of Complexity to Biology, Physics, Psychology, Philosophy, and Games, informally known as The Wild Book,[4] which quickly became an underground classic, but remained in typescript until its revision and editing by Chrystopher L. Nehaniv in 2009.

In 2015, he published, with Pedro V. Silva, the results of his current work in another monograph with Springer, Boolean Representations of Simplicial Complexes and Matroids.