Richard Edwin Stearns (born July 5, 1936) is a prominent computer scientist who, with Juris Hartmanis, received the 1993 ACM Turing Award in recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory. In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Stearns graduated with a B.A. in mathematics from Carleton College in 1958. He then received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1961 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled Three person cooperative games without side payments, under the supervision of Harold W. Kuhn. Stearns is now Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.