Dan Hirschberg

Daniel S. Hirschberg is a computer scientist and full professor of computer science at the University of California, Irvine, whose research centres on the theory of design and analysis of algorithms. He earned his doctorate in computer science from Princeton University in 1975 and later supervised the doctoral dissertation of Lawrence L. Larmore. He is best known for his 1975 and 1977 work on the longest common subsequence problem: Hirschberg's algorithm solves that problem, and the related string edit distance problem, efficiently in only linear space. He also contributed to distributed algorithms; with J. B. Sinclair he devised a leader election algorithm for a synchronous ring, which Nancy Lynch's textbook Distributed Algorithms names the HS algorithm after its authors.