John LeRoy Hennessy

Co-founder of MIPS Computer Systems Inc., Hennessy is known for developing the MIPS architecture and pioneering RISC chips. He has also served as the 10th President of Stanford University. He earned his Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Villanova University, and his Master's degree and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He became a Stanford faculty member in 1977.

In 1984, he used his sabbatical year to found MIPS Computer Systems Inc. to commercialize his research in RISC processors. In 1987, Hennessy became the Willard and Inez Kerr Bell Endowed Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He served as Director of Stanford's Computer System Laboratory (1989–1993), a research center run by Stanford's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments. He served as chair of the Department of Computer Science (1994–1996) and Dean of the School of Engineering (1996–1999).

In 1999, Stanford President Gerhard Casper appointed him to succeed Condoleezza Rice as Provost of Stanford University. The Stanford Board of Trustees named Hennessy to succeed Casper as President when Casper stepped down to focus on teaching in 2000. In 2008, he earned a salary that was the 23rd highest among all American university presidents. In 1997, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, ACM.

He has served as a board member of Google, Cisco Systems, Atheros Communications, and the Daniel Pearl Foundation. On October 14, 2010, he was presented a khata by the 14th Dalai Lama before His Holiness addressed Maples Pavilion. In December 2010, Hennessy coauthored an editorial with Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust urging the passage of the DREAM Act; the legislation did not pass the 111th United States Congress.

He has a history of strong interest and involvement in college-level computer education. He co-authored, with David A. Patterson, two well-known books on computer architecture, Computer Organization and Design: the Hardware/Software Interface and Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, which introduced the DLX RISC architecture. Both books have been widely used as textbooks for graduate and undergraduate courses since 1990.

Hennessy also contributed to updating Donald Knuth's MIX processor to the MMIX. Both are model computers used in Knuth's classic series, The Art of Computer Programming. MMIX is Knuth's DLX equivalent.