[6][7] They first moved to Germany, where Juris Hartmanis received the equivalent of a master's degree in physics from the University of Marburg.

[16] Hartmanis contributed to national efforts to advance computer science and engineering (CS&E) in many ways.

Most significantly, he chaired the National Research Council study that resulted in the 1992 publication Computing the Future – A Broad Agenda for Computer Science and Engineering,[17] which made recommendations based on its priorities to sustain the core effort in CS&E, to broaden the field, and to improve undergrad education in CS&E.

He was a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and of the American Mathematical Society,[19] also a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

The citation reads, "In recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory.

"[26] Their paper[13] defined the foundational notion of a Complexity class, a way of classifying computational problems according to the time required to solve them.

[35][36] Hartmanis's 1981 article [14] gives a personal account of developments in this area and in automata theory and discusses the underlying beliefs and philosophy that guided his research.

In the late 1980s, Hartmanis's exposition[39] on a newly discovered letter dated 20 March 1956 from Gödel to von Neumann brought fresh insight into the early history of computational complexity before his landmark paper with Stearns, touching on interactions among Turing, Gödel, Church, Post, and Kleene.