Daniel S. Hirschberg is a full professor in Computer Science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 at University of California, Irvine

University of California, Irvine

The University of California, Irvine , founded in 1965, is one of the ten campuses of the University of California, located in Irvine, California, USA...

. His research interests are in the theory of design and analysis of algorithms

Analysis of algorithms

To analyze an algorithm is to determine the amount of resources necessary to execute it. Most algorithms are designed to work with inputs of arbitrary length...

.

He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

 in 1975. He supervised the PhD dissertations of Lawrence L. Larmore

Lawrence L. Larmore

Professor Lawrence L. Larmore is a theoretical computer scientist, and a professor at University of Nevada Las Vegas. He is best known for his work with competitive analysis of online algorithms, particularly for the k-server problem. His contributions, with his co-author Marek Chrobak, led to the...

, James H. Hester, Cheng F. Ng, Debra A. (Lelewer) Brum, Lynn M. Stauffer, Steven S. Seiden, and Jonathan Kent Martin.

He is best known for his 1975 and 1977 work on the longest common subsequence problem

Longest common subsequence problem

The longest common subsequence problem is to find the longest subsequence common to all sequences in a set of sequences . Note that subsequence is different from a substring, see substring vs. subsequence...

: Hirschberg's algorithm

Hirschberg's algorithm

Hirschberg's algorithm, named after its inventor, Dan Hirschberg, is a dynamic programming algorithm that finds the least cost sequence alignment between two strings, where cost is measured as Levenshtein distance, defined to be the sum of the costs of insertions, replacements, deletions, and null...

 for this problem and for the related string edit distance problem solves it efficiently in only linear space. He is also known for his work in several other areas, including Distributed Algorithms

Distributed computing

Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...

. In Nancy Lynch

Nancy Lynch

Nancy Ann Lynch is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering in the EECS department and heads the Theory of Distributed Systems research group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.She is the...

's book Distributed Algorithms she gives details of an algorithm by Hirschberg and J. B. Sinclair for leader election in a synchronous ring. Lynch named this algorithm the HS algorithm

HS algorithm

The HS Algorithm is named after Dan Hirschberg and J. B. Sinclair. It is a distributed algorithm designed for the Leader Election problem in a Synchronous Ring....

, after its authors.