John Iacono

John Iacono is an American computer scientist who works on data structures, algorithms and computational geometry. He is best known as one of the inventors of the tango tree, which was the first known competitive binary search tree, a data structure whose running time on any sequence of searches stays within a small factor of the best possible tree for that sequence. Iacono took a master of science degree at the Stevens Institute of Technology and a doctorate at Rutgers University in 2001, under the supervision of Michael Fredman, another figure in the analysis of data structures. He has been named a Sloan Research Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar. After a period as a professor of computer science at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, he moved to the Université libre de Bruxelles, where he is a professor.