Congratulations to John Hennessy

I am thrilled to hear that John Hennessy, my mentor when I was a student, has won the annual Turing award, the most prestigious award in Computer Science.

Hennessy was my advisor when I was a Master's student, and he supervised my Master's project. Hennessy's dedication to his work inspired me to do more.

Hennessy was, at various times:

* A pioneer in RISC (reduced instruction set computer) architecture. Your cell phone has a RISC CPU in it.

* A co-founder of MIPS Computer Systems

* A co-author, with David Patterson, of the book "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach", which brought quantitative rigor to the black art of designing computer architectures. Even though I never did computer architecture, insights from that book helped me in my career.

* President of Stanford University

* Chairman of Alphabet, the parent company of Google

Hennessy shares the award with David Patterson, who is equally deserving. I have said little about Patterson simply because I don't know him.