Stephen Cook

Stephen Cook is a prominent computer scientist known for his foundational work in computational complexity theory. He is best known for formulating the concept of NP-completeness in 1971, which provides a framework for understanding the inherent difficulty of computational problems. Cook's theorem demonstrates that the Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT) is NP-complete, meaning that if there is a polynomial-time algorithm for SAT, then there is a polynomial-time algorithm for all problems in the class NP.