Alan Cobham (mathematician)

Alan Belmont Cobham (4 November 1927 – 28 June 2011) was an American mathematician and computer scientist known for (with Jack Edmonds and Michael O. Rabin) inventing the notion of polynomial time and the complexity class P,^[B] for Cobham's thesis stating that the problems that have practically usable computer solutions are characterized by having polynomial time,^[B] and for Cobham's theorem on the sets of numbers that can be recognized by finite automata.^[C] He also did foundational work on automatic sequences,^[D] invented priority queues and studied them from the point of view of queueing theory,^[A] and wrote a program for playing contract bridge that was at the time (in the mid-1980s) one of the best in the world.

Cobham was a student at Oberlin College, the University of Chicago, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but did not complete a doctorate. He became an operations researcher for the United States Navy, a researcher for IBM Research at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and a professor and founding department chair of the computer science department at Wesleyan University.