Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Aug 1, 2026

Michael A. Bender

Michael A. Bender is an American computer scientist, known for his work in cache-oblivious algorithms, lowest common ancestor data structures, scheduling (computing), and pebble games. He is David R. Smith Leading Scholar professor of computer science at Stony Brook University, and a co-founder of storage technology startup company Tokutek.

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Michael A. Bender
Alma materHarvard University, A.B. (1992)
École Normale Supérieure de Lyon D.E.A. (1993)
Harvard University, PhD (1998)
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
InstitutionsStony Brook University
Thesis New Algorithms and Metrics for Scheduling  (1998)
Michael O. Rabin

Michael A. Bender is an American computer scientist, known for his work in cache-oblivious algorithms, lowest common ancestor data structures, scheduling (computing), and pebble games. He is David R. Smith Leading Scholar professor of computer science at Stony Brook University,1 and a co-founder of storage technology startup company Tokutek.2

Early life and education

Bender obtained his PhD in computer science in 1998 from the Harvard University3 under the supervision of Michael O. Rabin.4

Research contributions

After completing his Ph.D., he co-founded Tokutek.5 He was program chair of the 19th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA 2006).6 The cache-oblivious B-tree data structures studied by Bender, Demaine, and Farach-Colton beginning in 2000 became the basis for the fractal tree index used by Tokutek's products TokuDB and TokuMX.2

Awards and honors

In 2012 Bender won the Simon Imre Test of Time award at LATIN.7 In 2015, his paper "Two-Level Main Memory Co-Design: Multi-Threaded Algorithmic Primitives, Analysis, and Simulation" won the Best Paper award at IPDPS.8 In 2016, his paper "Optimizing Every Operation in a Write-optimized File System" won the Best Paper award at FAST.9

In 2020, Bender was elected an ACM Distinguished Member.10

Selected publications

References

References

  1. [1], Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University, retrieved 2021-12-23.
  2. "Tokutek Founders to Speak at Big Data Techcon San Francisco", Market Wired, October 14, 2014.
  3. "Michael Bender - The Mathematics Genealogy Project". www.mathgenealogy.org.
  4. Michael A. Bender at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. "FAST 17". www.usenix.org.
  6. [2], ACM, retrieved 2021-12-23.
  7. "LATIN". latintcs.org. Retrieved 2021-10-08.
  8. "IPDPS 2015 Avance Program". ipdps.org. Retrieved 2021-12-13.
  9. "Best Papers". usenix.org. Retrieved 2021-11-24.
  10. Jim Ormond (December 16, 2020). "ACM Recognizes 2020 Distinguished Members for Contributions that Propel the Digital Age: Longstanding Members Cited for Significant Achievements across the Computing Field". Association for Computing Machinery. Retrieved January 9, 2026.
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