Richard E. Stearns (born July 5, 1936, Caldwell, New Jersey, U.S.) is an American mathematician and computer scientist and cowinner, with American computer scientist Juris Hartmanis, of the 1993 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science. Stearns and Hartmanis were cited for their “seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory.”

Stearns received a bachelor’s degree (1958) in mathematics from Carleton College and a doctorate (1961) in mathematics from Princeton University. Stearns then worked for the General Electric Company (1961–78) before returning to academia for a position at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). He taught at that school from 1978 to 2000, when he became professor emeritus.

“On the Computational Complexity of Algorithms,” published by Stearns and Hartmanis in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society (May 1965), established a precise measure of computational complexity and developed a theory of complexity classes. In addition to complexity theory, Stearns made contributions to analysis of algorithms, automata theory, and game theory.

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Stearns wrote Algebraic Structure Theory of Sequential Machines (1966), with Hartmanis, and Compiler Design Theory (1976), with SUNY computer science professors Philip M. Lewis and Daniel J. Rosenkrantz.